Flick, Robbert

Dutch, b. 1939 Amersfoort, Holland

BiographyThe Sequential Views series occupied Robbert Flick from 1979 through 1990, beginning with grids devoted to urban streets, ocean water, and the rural Midwest. The project expanded to include At Joshua, At Red Rock, At Solstice, At Vasquez Rocks, Japan Series, At Djerassi, and At Santa Monica Pier. Flick’s signature use of grid arrangements in this series ranges from scores of pictures in a single piece to just a few. Three photographs high by four wide, At Red Rock, Haagen County (Looking Northwest) is one of the more minimal works in the series but nonetheless evokes the same themes of movement, scale, and time. From frame to frame the views overlap or omit at varying intervals to create rhythms paced like film strips and sequences patterned like contact sheets. The grouping of similar pictures highlights the importance of selection when making a photograph, the impact of slight shifts, and the many possible ways to see or present a given subject. Flick’s concern with multiples is evident in the layered images of his early series L.A. Diary, though Sequential Views presents a more studied meditation on repetition and variation.

Robbert Flick was born in 1938 and grew up in Amersfoort, Holland. He received a BA from the University of British Columbia, Vancouver and both an MA and an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles. In addition to being a Getty Scholar, Flick is the recipient of two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship (2000). In 2004, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art organized his first major retrospective, Trajectories: The Photographic Work of Robbert Flick. Other exhibitions of his work have been held at the International Center for Photography, New York; National Museum of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, Arizona; and the Art Institute of Chicago. Other series include L.A. Diary (1967-72), Midwest Diary (1971-76), L.A. Doubles (1976-81), L.A. Documents (1990-2001), and Illinois Series begun in 2001. Flick was a Professor of Fine Arts at the University of Southern California.