ART-PRESENTATION: Tacita Dean…my English breath in foreign clouds
The British artist who works and resides in Berlin, Tacita Dean has for the last 18 months been living in Los Angeles. Drawing on the daily experience of this changed milieu and it is indicated by the title of the current exhibition Dean was inspired by what she hadn’t expected, which caused her to jettison preconceived ideas of work she might do in California.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Marian Goodman Gallery Archive
Tacita’s Dean new exhibition “…my English breath in foreign clouds”, features new drawing works, a series of photo works, a new film “Portraits“ (2016) and two recent films, “Buon Fresco” (2014) and “Event for a Stage” (2015). On the Third Floor from 2-26/3/16, “Event for a Stage”, a film made from a work for theater which was presented at the 19th Biennale of Sydney in 2014, is shown every 90 minutes. “A Concordance of Fifty American Clouds” is a collection of cloud works reprising several of her mediums while embracing two new ones: spray chalk, white charcoal pencil and gouache on salvaged Victorian era school slates, and lithographs with Gemini Gel. “What surprised me most about Los Angeles was the one thing I had imagined there would be little of and that was clouds. These clouds differed from their European counterparts because they were nearly never gray but extremely variable and white, they appeared unconnected to rain, as in Europe, but instead to the imperceptible activity of winds high above the earth’s surface….”. Using the book “A Complete Concordance to Shakespeare” as her guide to the titles of the slate drawings, the title of the exhibition “ is taken from “Richard II”. The title of the exhibition has resonance in the subject of Dean’s new 16mm film, “Portraits”. The artist David Hockney has smoked for years. He is a happy smoker but observes that these days in California, it has become nearly impossible to light up: “It used to be you couldn’t be gay. Now you can be gay but you can’t smoke. There’s always something”. Dean asked if she could film him having a cigarette. The resulting film is not one but five cigarettes and is compounded in its multiple portraitness by the series of portrait paintings that Hockney has been working on since returning to live in Los Angeles in 2013. Alongside Portraits is Dean’s 33 minute film “Buon Fresco”. Filmed in the Upper Basilica of St Francis of Assisi, Dean observes Giotto’s frescos of The Life of St Francis at extremely close quarter using a macro lens and a scissor lift, giving the viewer the privilege of detail and the normally impossible perspective of the painter himself. In the South Gallery, Dean is showing “GAETA”, a series of 51 photographs, taken in 2008 in Cy Twombly’s house and studio in the Italian town of Gaeta. They were published as a photo essay, in the catalogue of Twombly’s exhibition at MUMOK in Vienna in 2009, where Dean invited him to collaborate with her in making the original selection. Dean decided to use Cibachrome photographic paper to realize the essay as a photographic series while also extending it to include various photochemical processes and papers also under threat. On the third floor, Dean is showing “Event for a Stage”. Originally commissioned as a live performance on four consecutive nights at Carriageworks as part of the 2014 Sydney Biennial, it became Dean’s first foray into theatre and her first experience of working with an actor. Dean filmed each of the four nights as part of the performance with the intention of making the film.
Info: Marian Goodman Gallery, 24 West 57 Street, New York, Duration: 2/3-23/4/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat: 10:00-18:00, http://mgg.basikgroup.com
