Rineke Dijkstra Night Watching and Pictures from the Archive

Kolobrzeg, Poland, July 27, 1992, 2023 Archival inkjet print Image: 59 x 46 7/8 in. (150 x 119 cm) Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery Copyright: Rineke Dijkstra

Marian Goodman Gallery is pleased to present a new exhibition of Rineke Dijkstra. The exhibition will include the East Coast premiere of Night Watching (2019), a three-channel video installation commissioned and first shown at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam in 2019. Dijkstra will also present a selection of never before-seen works following a two-year period of revisiting her archive. These include new pictures from her Beach Portrait series, as well as selected portraits that span a decade created in locations all over the world. Both Night Watching and the new photographs show the diverse ways in which people connect to each other, to the camera, to art and to the viewer.

Night Watching (2019), a three-channel video installation, features 14 groups of people observing and speaking in front of Rembrandt's iconic painting The Night Watch (1642). These conversations vary from visual descriptions to conjectures on the circumstances in which the painting was created. A group of Dutch schoolgirls discuss whether Rembrandt gave the only woman in the painting the face of his wife Saskia; Japanese businessmen consider the painting’s potential for tourism; and a group of young artists discuss what it must feel like to make such an incomparable masterpiece. The scenes in the video are sequenced to explore the different ways a viewer might relate to a painting and its subject. The first groups speculate about what they are seeing: for instance, a dog painted in a vague manner, or an illuminated girl. They are followed by groups who link similar observations to their own personal lives, making comparisons between past and current society. The final groups examine the painting within an art historical context.

Installation views: “Night Watching and Pictures from the Archive,” Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, 2023 Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery Copyright: Rineke Dijkstra Photo credit: Alex Yudzon

Dijkstra was given unprecedented access to film Night Watching in the Rijksmuseum's Gallery of Honour, after closing time, over the course of six evenings. She filmed directly in front of Rembrandt’s The Night Watch, so that the participants would have a personal and close encounter with the painting. When exhibited at the Rijksmuseum, Night Watching was installed in a room adjacent to The Night Watch, offering visitors an opportunity to revisit the painting. In a broader context, Dijkstra’s Night Watching offers us the occasion to engage in and reflect on the conversational and social nature of people in a discursive relationship to art and history, and to consider the importance of storytelling in the creation of meaning, culture and history. These subjects were similarly explored in Dijkstra’s 2009 video installation I See a Woman Crying which features British schoolchildren looking at and discussing Picasso’s painting The Weeping Woman (1937) at Tate Liverpool.

Installation views: “Night Watching and Pictures from the Archive,” Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, 2023 Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery Copyright: Rineke Dijkstra Photo credit: Alex Yudzon

While the Beach Portraits that Dijkstra exhibited earlier in her career often focused on young people as autonomous subjects, the works in this new exhibition focus on connection. The duos and groups in these works have been captured all over the world, from the beaches of Poland, the United States, and the 1 Citing text by Hans den Hartog Jager on the work Night Watching Netherlands, to various locations in Ghana, the UK, and Ukraine. In these pictures Dijkstra raises the question of how the bond between people becomes visible - which can be through a subtle resemblance in appearance, a similarity in bodily attitude towards the camera, the casual holding of two hands, or even through a strikingly large difference between the characters. All photos in this exhibition invite the viewer to consider the ways in which human beings can forge identity and potency through their connection to each other. Precisely because of her exceptional eye for detail and the gestures unique to each individual, and her great sense of human relationships and emotions, these portraits shine a special light on the power of Rineke Dijkstra's unique oeuvre.

Rineke Dijkstra was trained at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam. Her first solo exhibition took place in 1984 at de Moor in Amsterdam. Dijkstra's photographs have appeared in numerous international exhibitions, including the 1997 and 2001 Venice Biennale, the 1998 Bienal de São Paulo, Turin's Biennale Internationale di Fotografia in 1999 and the 2003 International Center for Photography's Triennial of Photography and Video in New York; Manifesta 10, St. Petersburg (2014); ICA, Boston in 2019; Barbican Art Gallery, London (2020); The Getty Museum, Los Angeles (2022).

Solo exhibitions of her work have been shown at Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP), Paris (2023); Timken Museum, San Diego (2022); Lehmbruck Museum in Duisburg (2022); Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (2019) de Pont, Tilburg, the Netherlands (2018); Sprengel Museum, Hannover (2018), Louisiana Museum of Art, Denmark (2017); Hasselblad Center, Gothenberg (2017); National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. (2016); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, and Guggenheim Museum, New York (2012); Tate Liverpool (2010), Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland, Jeu de Paume, Paris and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2005-6), and the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago (2001). She is the recipient of a number of awards, including the Spectrum Internationaler Preis für Fotografie der Stiftung Niedersachsen (2018), the Hasselblad Foundation International Award (2017), Citibank Private Bank Photography Prize – now Deutsche Börse Photography Prize – (1998), Werner Mantz Award (1994). Please join us at the opening reception on Tuesday, October 31st, from 6-8 pm.

The exhibit opened on October 31st with a reception and will close on the 20th of December of this year. For more information please visit the Marian Goodman Gallery’s website.