Tacita Dean | Quatemary

BORCH Gallery is delighted to invite you to an exhibition of Tacita Dean’s latest print project. Quatemary is a contructed landscape of post-apocalpytic ruin, composed of found 19th century albumen prints merged with the artist’s writings and drawings.

The 6,5 metre-long artwork is the culmination of her previous photogravure works where she has been developing techniques far beyond traditional printmaking. Over the years, they have become a major part of her oeuvre. Since Dean first worked with photogravure in 2001, she has explored ways of combining found material with graphic over-drawing and writing, which originated from techniques first developed from her blackboard drawings. With Quatemary, Dean is fusing her use of found imagery with actual blackboard drawing to create an epic narrative within a single pictorial frame.

Her inspiration was the memory of a documentary on the Yellowstone supervolcano, as she explains: ‘The Yellowstone supervolcano is a blister of a volcano, which has no release. Magma has been gathering beneath the Park’s crust for millennia with no means to break through. The surface is noticeably rising and noticeably steaming. Soon, the programme said, the pressure would become so great that the ground would be wrenched apart causing an explosion of such epic magnitude that several states of America would be as good as wiped out instantaneously, and that it would cause the rest of the world to be covered with an ash cloud, so dense that it would block out the sun and cause an ice age. The human species would become extinct.’

Tacita Dean, born 1965 in Canterbury, England, lives and works in Berlin and has been collaborating with BORCH Gallery & Editions since 2001.