Rineke Dijkstra

Noted photographer and video artist Rineke Dijkstra screens and discusses her work, which frequently explores the identity of adolescents and young adults. Dijkstra, a Dutch artist based in Amsterdam, is the Wexner Center Residency Award recipient in media arts for 2002Ò03. Photographer and video artist Rineke Dijkstra has gained an international reputation over the last several years for her penetrating portraits of adolescents and young adults. Born in 1959, she is one of the most highly regarded Dutch artists of her generation. In the U.S., she has had solo exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston and the Art Institute of Chicago and was the 1999 winner of the Citibank Private Photography Prize.

Her work combines formal lyricism and vivid coloring with psychological depth and social awareness. Her best-known work has been a series of photographs of adolescent bathers, a project begun in the U.S. and Eastern Europe in 1992 and still ongoing. More recently she has also produced a remarkable portrait series of young Israeli men and women who've just begun their military service. Dijkstra has also used video to explore the phenomenon of adolescence.

For her Wexner Center residency, Dijkstra will continue her invesitgation of portraiture with young adults. She is interested in doing a series of portraits of art students, and she will attend art classes at Ohio State in order to identify subjects.

Images courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery. (Please note: both images have been cropped.)