The Dutch photographer Rineke Dijkstra (1959) has achieved international acclaim through her powerful cycles of portraits, focusing primarily on highly specific, ordinary people and their individual fates and emotions. Her large-format portraits are simple, rendered in subtle colours yet full of intense expression, classically composed yet charged with an extraordinary emotional force, far removed from any arbitrary stereotypes.

The ensemble of work selected for the Prague exhibition is an overview of all the pictorial cycles that Dijkstra created starting in the early 1990s. These include beach portraits, mothers shortly after giving birth, matadors, photographs made in Berlin’s Tiergarten, girls in the Liverpool Buzzclub, Israeli solders (male and female), Almerisa, Olivier and two videos entitled Buzzclub, Liverpool, UK/Mysteryworld, Zaandam, NL and Annemiek. What can safely be asserted about all the portraits is that the artist succeeded in depicting their subjects in the moments when they most naturally live their own unique lives, bound to the instantaneous internal experience far removed from the artificial and manipulated world of the media. Rineke Dijkstra’s creative approach is transparent, formal and precise. She never employs photographic tricks or manipulates the image. The simplicity of the pictorial means used guides all attention directly to the personality being portrayed, who in his or her individual way reveals a definite uncertainty facing the camera a vulnerability yet equally a delicate uniqueness.

Curator: Hripsimé Visser