Tacita Dean: The Dante Project · One Hundred and Fifty Years of Painting · Pan Amicus · Significant Form · Monet Hates Me
Tacita Dean
The Dante Project · One Hundred and Fifty Years of Painting · Pan Amicus · Significant Form · Monet Hates Me
7 September - 23 October 2021
Tacita Dean On "Pan Amicus"
Marian Goodman Gallery is very pleased to announce that our Fall season will open with an exhibition of new works by Tacita Dean. The show will include a range of works in multiple mediums, including photogravure, large-scale photographs, silkscreen prints, two new 16mm films, slate drawings and a new box edition, nearly all inspired from her time living in Los Angeles, from 2014 to the present.
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Panselinos, 2021
Spray chalk, gouache, and charcoal pencil on slate
Slate: 16 3/4 x 21 in. (42.5 x 53.3 cm)
Frame: 19 1/4 x 23 5/8 x 3 in. (48.9 x 60 x 7.6 cm)
(25109)
The exhibition unfolds around a new body of work made in association with ‘The Dante Project,’ commissioned by The Royal Opera House in London to create new designs for The Royal Ballet, which will premiere in October 2021. Centered on Dante’s Divine Comedy, with new music by Thomas Adès and choreography by Wayne McGregor, the ballet is structured in three parts: Inferno; Purgatorio; and Paradiso. Dean represents these three realms of Dante’s journey 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.
A parallel journey begins in the North Gallery with a new large-scale photogravure in eight parts, Inferno (2021). Produced by Niels Borch Jensen, it exists in dialogue with the monumental 40-foot blackboard by the same title which served as the master for the backdrop of Inferno (and will be shown concurrently in the Paul Hamlyn Hall at The Royal Opera House). 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 (1st Cornice), 2021
Colored pencil on Fuji Velvet paper mounted on paper
149 5/8 x 136 1/8 in. (380 x 345.5 cm)
(24353)

Purgatory (2nd Cornice), 2021
Colored pencil on Fuji Velvet paper mounted on paper
141 3/4 x 188 1/2 in. (360 x 478.8 cm)
(24354)

Purgatory (3rd Cornice), 2021
Colored pencil on Fuji Velvet paper mounted on paper
140 1/8 x 177 in. (355.91 x 449.58 cm)
(24355)

Purgatory (4th Cornice), 2021
Colored pencil on Fuji Velvet paper mounted on paper
137 3/4 x 176 3/8 in. (350 x 448 cm)
(24356)

Purgatory (5th Cornice), 2021
Colored pencil on Fuji Velvet paper mounted on paper
139 3/4 x 176 7/8 in. (355 x 449.4 cm)
(25032)
Purgatory, the middle state, is depicted here as a transitional state between negative and positive, a concept developed in the five striking large photographs on view, each scaled in proportion to their original subject: jacaranda trees in Los Angeles. Beginning with large negatives of each tree, Dean created internegatives in order to reverse each into a photographic print, with violet blooms transforming into an otherworldly green. This strange intermediary state is accentuated by the artist’s meticulous hand-coloring in around the trees with white crayon.

Paradise (Seraphim), 2021
18 color screen print with a satin seal varnish on Somerset Satin Tub 410g.
Print: 24 1/4 x 57 1/8 in. (61.5 x 145 cm) (each)
Frame: 26 1/2 x 59 1/2 x 2 in. (67.3 x 151.1 x 5.1 cm) (each)
Edition of 24 plus 8 APs
(25272)

Paradise (Angels), 2021
17 color screen print with a satin seal varnish on Somerset Satin Tub 410g.
Print: 24 1/4 x 57 1/8 in. (61.5 x 145 cm) (each)
Frame: 26 1/2 x 59 1/2 x 2 in. (67.3 x 151.1 x 5.1 cm) (each)
Edition of 24 plus 8 APs
(25272)

Paradise (Empyrean), 2021
18 color screen print with a satin seal varnish on Somerset Satin Tub 410g.
Print: 24 1/4 x 57 1/8 in. (61.5 x 145 cm) (each)
Frame: 26 1/2 x 59 1/2 x 2 in. (67.3 x 151.1 x 5.1 cm) (each)
Edition of 24 plus 8 APs
(25272)
A series of 10 handmade 15-color silkscreen prints represent Paradise through spheres and abstract forms which refer to the various celestial stages of Paradiso. These are taken from Dean’s 35mm anamorphic film, which will be shown on the stage in the final act of the ballet. The film, titled Paradise, features an aperture gate masking system that allows different sequences to exist within a single-film frame. It is inspired by the colors used in the Paradise section of William Blake’s series of vivid watercolor illustrations of the Divine Comedy (1824). Taking the latter as a point of departure, Dean captures and experiments with pure light and color as her subject in an entirely abstracted form.
In the South Gallery, two new 16mm films will have their premiere in this exhibition. One Hundred and Fifty Years of Painting (2021: 16mm color film, continuous loop, optical sound, 50 ½ min) continues Dean’s tradition of artists’ portraits using the medium of film. Luchita Hurtado and Julie Mehretu, who in 2020 would have shared a birthday exactly five decades apart, are shown here in dialogue in a moving double-portrait. Filmed in Santa Monica on 3 January last year, the film features a congruence of lives which have overlapped in serendipitous ways, with musings on painting, motherhood, nature/ecology and more.

Frame: 12 3/4 x 12 3/4 x 1 5/5 in. (30.5 x 32.4 x 4.1 cm)

The Great God Pan is Dead, 2021
Collage on vintage index card
Paper: 4 x 6 in. (10.2 x 15.2 cm)
Frame: 12 3/4 x 12 3/4 x 1 5/5 in. (30.5 x 32.4 x 4.1 cm)
(25291)