Special Installation: Rineke Dijkstra

Active as a photographer since the early 1990s, Rineke Dijkstra is known for her strikingly earnest, unsentimental depictions of young people in large-scale color prints. Shooting from a low vantage point with minimal background information, she endows her subjects with a monumental presence, creating portraits that are at once self-conscious but revealing, powerful but tender. This exhibition features four of Dijkstra’s portraits of adolescents, as well as a 1991 self-portrait that inspired much of her later work. It is timed to coincide with the installation of I See a Woman Crying (Weeping Woman), a three-channel video of British schoolchildren talking about Picasso’s painting Weeping Woman, on view in the East Building’s display of Collectors Committee gifts.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website.

 Whether you go or not, Rineke Dijkstra: A Retrospective is the first comprehensive monograph on this important Dutch artist’s work in photography and video to be published in the United States. It features the Beach Portraits and other early works such as the photographs of new mothers and bullfighters, together with selections from Dijkstra’s later work including her most recent video installations. Also included are series that she has been working on continuously for years, such as Almerisa (1994–present), which documents a young immigrant girl as she grows up and adapts to her new environment.

Rineke Dijkstra: A Retrospective