Color Studies, 1970s
Ten colour photographs on paper
83 x 83 cm each
Courtesy the artist and Alan Cristea Gallery, London

To make his Color Studies, Dibbets sought out cars on the streets around his Amsterdam studio and snapped photographs of their surfaces. Initially he avoided revealing any hint of his subject, but by the end he had abandoned that rule, and viewers can glimpse the occasional telltale strip of metal or outline of a door. Just as Dibbets was drawn to the anonymity of car colours, he found that a detached approach suited him best: 'The less I cared the better they came out.' His instincts as a colourist surfaced only in the final arrangements of the photographs into groups of three or four.