Tacita Dean’s Moments
Catching Light, History, Time, Place
The Marian Goodman Gallery in New York is opening its Fall season with new works by artist Tacita Dean, best known for her work in film. Multiple mediums are represented in the show, including photogravure, large-scale photographs, silkscreen prints, two new 16mm films, slate drawings, and a new box edition. Nearly all of the works are a product of her time living in Los Angeles (from 2014 to the present).
British European artist Tacita Dean was born in Canterbury in 1965. Based in Berlin and Los Angeles, she has been recognized for excellent work throughout her career. She was the winner of the Hugo Boss Prize in 2006, the Sixth Benesse Prize at the 51st Venice Biennale in 2005, and the Kurt Schwitters Prize in 2009. She was elected to the Royal Academy of Arts in 2008, and in 1998 she was nominated for the Turner Prize. In LA, she was the Artist in Residence at the Getty Research Institute (2014/2015).
The Dante Project, commissioned by The Royal Opera House in London to create new designs for The Royal Ballet premiering in October 2021, is linked to this new body of work. The ballet is centered on Dante’s Divine Comedy and is in three parts: Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso; which Dean navigates “in an inspired odyssey through various mediums and means of representation, with works that move from drawing to photography and film; from negative to positive, representation to abstraction, and monochrome to color.”
In the North Gallery is a new large-scale photogravure (a photo-mechanical process using a copper plate) in eight parts, Inferno (2021). “Inferno’s photogravure re-creates an ‘upside down cold place’ through an aesthetic of reversals and opposites. Using collaged elements for the first time, including black dots to represent the figures of Dante and Virgil as they progress through the circles, Dean signifies upper and lower realms through positives and negatives, blacks and whites, disrupting a received spectrum of perdition—ranging from Botticelli to Blake—with a cool monochrome underworld.”
Purgatory, the intermediate state, is depicted as a transitional state between
negative and positive, represented in the five photographs on the view of jacaranda trees in Los Angeles. The series of 10 handmade silkscreen prints represent Paradise through spheres and abstract forms, which allude to the different celestial stages of Paradiso.
In the South Gallery, two new 16mm films are premiering in this exhibition. A new series of slate drawings, Panselinos (2021) and The Great God Pan is Dead (2021), is shown in conjunction with the new film Pan Amicus (2021: 16mm color film, continuous loop, optical sound, 31 min). In the Third Floor Project Room, Dean presents two projects completed over the past year: Significant Form (2021) and Monet Hates Me (2021). “Designed as ‘an exhibition in a box,’ Monet Hates Me (2021) is an edition of one hundred clothbound and foil embossed boxes, each containing fifty objects, some unique to each box. The source material was discovered by Dean in the Getty Research Institute Special Collections; her residency research project was, ‘The importance of objective chance as a tool of research,’ therefore allowing chance to guide her research.”
The deep meaning behind each of her works is extraordinary. The exhibit opened on September 7 and runs through October 23, 2021.
