Rineke Dijkstra
PROJECT
Night Watching captures fourteen different groups of people responding to Rembrandt’s The night watch, 1642, held in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. The video work foregrounds the relationships, social dynamics and interpretations that coalesce around Rembrandt’s famed painting. The conversations range from close visual descriptions to speculation about how the work was made. Some participants focus on details they can immediately see, while others connect the seventeenth-century scene to contemporary life. Night Watching aligns with Dijkstra’s broader practice of using portraiture to explore how identity is shaped through attention, vulnerability and exchange. As Dijkstra explains, ‘By the way [the viewers] reflect on the painting, they create portraits of themselves.’
The acquisition of this artist’s work is supported by Bagôt Gjergja Foundation, Sarah Cronin, Samuel Cronin and Bradley Cronin, and Barry Janes AM & Paul Cross AM
ABOUT
Since the early 1990s, Rineke Dijkstra has produced a complex body of photographic and video work, offering a contemporary take on the genre of portraiture. Solo exhibitions of her work have been held at Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main (Germany); Espace Louis Vuitton, Munich (Germany); Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris (France); Museum De Pont, Tilburg (the Netherlands); Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek (Denmark); National Gallery of Art, Washington D. C. (US); Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (Spain); the Museum für Moderne Kunst (MMK), Frankfurt (Germany); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco (US); the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (US); among others. Dijkstra has been honoured with several major photography prizes, including the Johannes Vermeer Award (2020), Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography (2017), the SPECTRUM International Prize for Photography of the Stiftung Niedersachsen (2017), and the Citibank Private Bank Photography Prize (1999).