Jan Dibbets’ work is Dutch as Dutch can be. Last February the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven held an exhibition of his work from 1972–80.

Born in 1941, Dibbets was originally a painter. He went to the Academy in Tilburg and studied for some time at London’s St. Martin ’s School of Art. Around 1967, he decided that painting had led him to a dead end, and that the next logical step was total three-dimensionality.

After this sidestep into sculpture Dibbets found his way: he made a number of projects about light like “The Shadows In My Studio”, 1969, a sequence of photographs taken every ten