The ensemble of work selected is an overview of all the pictorial cycles that the artist created starting in the early 1990s. The artist succeeded in depicting their subjects in the moments when they most naturally live their own unique lives, bound to the instantaneous internal experience far removed from the artificial and manipulated world of the media.
Portraits
The Dutch photographer Rineke Dijkstra (1959) has achieved international acclaim
through her powerful cycles of portraits, focusing primarily on highly specific,
ordinary people and their individual fates and emotions. Her large-format portraits
are simple, rendered in subtle colours yet full of intense expression, classically
composed yet charged with an extraordinary emotional force, far removed from any
arbitrary stereotypes.
The ensemble of work selected for the Prague exhibition is an
overview of all the pictorial cycles that Dijkstra created starting in the early
1990s. These include beach portraits, mothers shortly after giving birth, matadors,
photographs made in Berlin's Tiergarten, girls in the Liverpool Buzzclub, Israeli
solders (male and female), Almerisa, Olivier and two videos entitled Buzzclub,
Liverpool, UK/Mysteryworld, Zaandam, NL and Annemiek.
What can safely be asserted about all the portraits is that the artist succeeded in depicting their
subjects in the moments when they most naturally live their own unique lives, bound to the
instantaneous internal experience far removed from the artificial and manipulated
world of the media. Rineke Dijkstra's creative approach is transparent, formal and
precise. She never employs photographic tricks or manipulates the image.
The simplicity of the pictorial means used guides all attention directly to the
personality being portrayed, who in his or her individual way reveals a definite
uncertainty facing the camera a vulnerability yet equally a delicate uniqueness.
Galerie Rudolfinum
Alsovo nabrezi, 12 - Prague
Opening hours: Tue-Sun 10 a.m. - 6 p.m.