Name: Rineke Dijkstra
Start: 2024-12-13
End: 2025-05-18
Location: Städel Museum

The ocean—a gaze: The artist Rineke Dijkstra (*1959) portrays young people looking directly into the camera on various beaches around the world—in Poland, Great Britain, Ukraine, Croatia and the United States. The carefully composed photographs are a search for the essence of human existence: sensitive encounters in which the artist also raises questions about authenticity and truthfulness in portrait photography.

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About the Exhibition

The Städel Museum will present 27 of Dijkstra’s works in a solo exhibition, including 23 images from her “Beach Portraits” series, which attracted international attention and established her as one of the most influential female photographers in contemporary art. Works from the “Streets” series and a self-portrait of the artist are also featured in the exhibition.

In her work, Rineke Dijkstra succeeds in sensitively approaching the essence of the human being—a claim shared by photographic theory and art history.

Maja Lisewski, Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art and curator of the exhibition, Städel Museum

Rineke Dijkstra (*1959)
Kolobrzeg, Poland, July 26, 1992, 1992
Rineke Dijkstra (*1959)
Jalta, Ukraine, July 30, 1993, 1993
Rineke Dijkstra (*1959)
Long Island, N.Y., USA, July 1, 1993, 1993

In the “Beach Portraits” series, created mainly in the 1990s, Dijkstra links the young people portrayed across national borders through a consistent composition. Set against the serene, basic background of the sea and reduced in context and clothing, the focus is entirely on the subjects, their characters and their youthful naturalness, which are manifested in the tiniest nuances of facial expression and posture—especially when, despite their best efforts, their emotional worlds are revealed. As a result, these powerful shots become timeless images that embody the human condition, full of uncertainty, curiosity and the search for identity. Through their unique visual language, which draws on art historical references ranging from the works of Sandro Botticelli to August Sander, among others, Dijkstra’s photographs express a contemporary historical view of the post-Cold War era.

Curator
Maja Lisewski, Assistant Curator, Contemporary Art Collection

Gallery

**Rineke Dijkstra (*1959)**
Kolobrzeg, Poland, July 26, 1992, 1992

**Rineke Dijkstra (*1959)**
Self-Portrait, Marnixbad, Amsterdam, Netherlands, June 19, 1991, 1991

**Rineke Dijkstra (*1959)**
Jalta, Ukraine, July 30, 1993, 1993

**Rineke Dijkstra (*1959)**
Long Island, N.Y., USA, July 1, 1993, 1993

Rineke Dijkstra’s portraits could not be more contemporary, and at the same time they are already great works of art history: they have long been icons of photography.

Philipp Demandt, Director, the Städel Museum

About Rineke Dijkstra

Rineke Dijkstra (*1959 in Sittard, Netherlands) lives and works in Amsterdam, where she studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy from 1981 to 1986. She has received numerous awards, including the Hasselblad Foundation Award in 2017 and the Johannes Vermeer Award in 2020, and is represented in major international collections such as the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the MACBA in Barcelona, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Tate Modern in London and the Städel Museum in Frankfurt am Main. Her work has been the subject of major solo exhibitions at the Berlinische Galerie, Berlin (2024), the Lehmbruck Museum, Duisburg (2022), the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (2019), the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek (2017), the Museum für Moderne Kunst (MMK), Frankfurt am Main (2013) and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2012), among others.