Rineke Dijkstra

Rineke Dijkstra was born in Sittard, The Netherlands in 1959. 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. Her large-scale color photographs of young, typically adolescent subjects recall 17th-century Dutch painting in their scale and visual acuity. The minimal contextual details present in her photographs and videos encourage us to focus on the exchange between photographer and subject and the relationship between viewer and viewed. 

Dijkstra attended the Gerrit Rietveld Academy, Amsterdam from 1981-1986.  She has been honored with the Johannes Vermeer Award (2020); Hasselblad Foundation International Award (2017); the Macallan Royal Photographic Society Award, London, UK (2012); the Citibank Photography Prize (1999); the Werner Mantz Award (1994); and the Kodak Award Netherlands (1987), among others.

Recent solo exhibitions have been at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands (2019); The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2018); the DePont Museum, Tilburg, Netherlands (2018); and the Sprengel Museum, Hannover, Germany (2018); the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark (2017); the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands (2017); and the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. (2016). A mid-career retrospective of Dijkstra’s work was exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California, and at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2012. In 2013 the first comprehensive film retrospective of her work, The Krazy House, was shown at the Museum für Moderne Kunst (MMK) Frankfurt, Germany.