ART CITIES: Los Angeles-Tacita Dean

Tacita Dean is one of the most important artists working today. Her subject matter is often historical, touching on memory and empathy, the forces of nature and the traces left behind by humanity. Her works, from her early chalk on blackboard drawings to her four or more leaf clover collection, round stones, and found postcard interventions become ardent witnesses to a lost past, and the desire to capture, in imagery, the incomprehensible.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Gemini G.E.L. Archive

In her solo exhibition “LA Magic Hour”, Tacita Dean presents fifteen new prints that complement her previous lithographic project, “LA Exuberance” (2016), also on view, , which depicted white clouds contrasted with the bright cerulean blues of a typical Los Angeles sky. This time, the artist has focused on the iconic sunsets of Los Angeles. Dean began by working from the spray chalk drawings she created for LA Exuberance and narrowing the selection down to fifteen. The images were then inverted and rotated to find the desired compositions. Through a complex technique of layering transparent and semi-opaque colors, master printer Jill Lerner color matched Dean’s many photographs of colorful west coast sunsets. The fifteen lithographs appear effortlessly luminous, capturing the atmospheric space through a balance of blended and contrasting swaths of vivid colors. When viewed as a whole, the two  series captures the variety of tones and colors shifting as the sun sets—taking us through the pale oranges and yellow tinged blues that begin a sunset, all the way to the electric magenta of its last breath. This is not the first time that Dean has taken up the subject of a sunset. For her film “The Green Ray” (2001), Dean traveled to a beach in Madagascar to capture an optical phenomenon wherein a briefly visible green spot can be seen for a few seconds atop the setting sun. To sit and watch a sunset is a universally familiar experience that encapsulates the passage of time, whether captured on celluloid film or as still images vis-à-vis lithography. Separated from any specific horizon line, Dean’s cloudscapes depict the eternal mutability of the sky and the earth’s motion. Dean has been fascinated by natural phenomena throughout her career; images of trees, oceans, clouds, and landscapes are pervasive in her work. Her instinctive ability to focus on an everyday natural phenomenon, such as a sunset, recalls the wonder and complexity of a cloud in its ephemeral state. Each lithograph in “LA Magic Hour” represents a singular, unique moment in time and in the imagination of the artist, a beautiful synthesis of her fascination and studies in the colors and formations of clouds.

Tacita Dean was born in 1965 in England. She attended the Falmouth School of Art (1985–88), Supreme School of Fine Art in Athens (1989–90), and the Slade School of Fine Art in London (1990–92). Since the early 1990s, Dean’s impressive body of work has navigated the forgotten corners of history and experience through a range of films, photographs, drawings, and installations. “Ztráta” (1991–2002), one of Dean’s earliest films, explored the terms presence, absence, and loss (“ztráta” in Czech) in a classroom in post-communist Prague. Her film “The Story of Beard” (1992) narrated the tale of a shop owner who amassed a collection of beards. In “A Bag of Air” (1995), the camera captures the shrinking shadow of a hot air balloon as it ascends away from the ground, and then cuts to images of Dean trying to capture air in a plastic bag. Soon after, Dean devised several works surrounding the adventures and demise of seafarer Donald Crowhurst in “Disappearance at Sea” (1996), “Disappearance at Sea II” (1997), and “Teignmouth Electron” (2000). In 1997 she created a sound recording of her unsuccessful journey in search of Smithson’s iconic earthwork in “Trying to Find the Spiral Jetty”. In 1997 Dean moved to London. That same year she began to exhibit splices of magnetic tape cut the length required to document the duration of the sound indicated, such as a raven’s cry. She also extended her interest to drawings of the sea, Dean again focused on surprising solar effects. Soon after the artist’s move to Berlin in 2000, she responded to the city’s layered history with films and related photogravures.  In 2002, Dean paid homage to precedents of experimental art in two very different films. The film triptych “Boots “(2003) follows a mysterious character, blind in one eye and wearing an orthopedic boot, who speaks in French, English, and German as he laboriously traipses through the Casa de Serralves in Porto. Dean chronicles the memories and divergent attitudes of her two uncles as they discuss the family business in “The Uncles” (2004). In “Darmstädter Werkblock “(2007), Dean filmed the galleries containing Joseph Beuys’s installation in Hessisches Landesmuseum Darmstadt, while the controversial renovation of the space was underway. Dean explored the subject of writer W.G. Sebald in her film “Michael Hamburge”r (2007). Dean recorded dancer Merce Cunningham performing his iconic choreography in “Merce Cunningham performs STILLNESS (in three movements) to John Cage’s composition 4’33” with Trevor Carlson, New York City, 28 April 2007” (2008).

Photo: Tacita Dean, from the series “LA Exuberance” , 2016, Hand-drawn 3-color blend lithograph, 29 7/8″ x 29 7/8″ (75.88 x 75.88 cm), Edition of 36, © Tacita Dean, Courtesy the artist and Gemini G.E.L. Gallery

Info: Gemini G.E.L. Gallery, 8365 Melrose Avenue, Los Angeles, CA, USA, Duration: 4/2-1/4/2022, Days & Hours: Mon-Fri 9:00-17:00, www.geminigel.com