Market Art Fair 2025

Tacita Dean’s ten-metre long print Inferno is made in eight parts and depicts Dante and Virgil’s descent into Hell as described by Dante Alighieri in his Divine Comedy, 1321. The prints feature an inverted mountainscape in negative, inscribed with text, marks, splashes, and collaged elements. Like Dean’s other photogravures with BORCH Editions, her source materials are found images: in this case a series of nineteenth century photographs of a mountainous panorama.

In Sandro Botticelli’s epic manuscript interpretation of Divine Comedy, Dante and Virgil are sequentially repeated like cyphers in a singular drawing, bringing, to Dean’s mind, a sense of cinematic timing to the Map of Hell. Dean has appropriated this idea by using circles to represent the figures: glossy and opaque for the living Dante and translucent for the shade Virgil. She has also experimented with embedding collaged elements into the gravure process for the first time.

Printmaking has become an essential part of Dean’s artistic practice since she first collaborated with Niels Borch Jensen’s Copenhagen printmaking studio more than 20 years ago. Partly based on her films, partly created from found material like postcards or vintage photographs, she employs the printing techniques of photogravure, directgravure, offset lithography and screenprinting to transfer her poetic visual narratives into the realm of printmaking.

THE DANTE PROJECT – A BALLET

Tacita Dean was commissioned to create the designs and costumes for the ballet The Dante Project in 2021. The ballet was inspired by Dante’s Divine Comedy with music by Thomas Adès and choreography by Wayne MacGregor and marked the 700th anniversary of the poet’s death. Dean’s white on black drawing of an inverted mountain range was the striking backdrop to the performance to which Inferno relates.

Alexander Tovborg has collaborated with BORCH Editions for over eight years to create three large series of etchings to accompany each of the three books of The Divine Comedy; Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso.

This late-medieval poem The Divine Comedy is an early and ongoing influence on Tovborg’s practice. Exiled from the city of Florence, Dante critiqued the Catholic Church with the Comedy’s graphic descriptions of torment that were used by the clergy to control its faithful followers. This critique of power in the name of religion and the absurdity and ingenuity of Dante’s work has inspired Tovborg, who’s practice mirrors the same ambiguity of both feeling connected to the message of religion and the church, and also being in a position of standing outside looking in.

Tovborg’s distinctive and immersive artistic practice encompasses painting, prints, sculpture, installation, and performance. His figurative imagery, ornamental shapes and rich colour combinations are explorations of fundamental human questions that have arisen through religious narratives, mythology and symbols. Through his work he considers how our own grand narratives were formed and how they might change and evolve.

PARADISO

Tovborg’s Paradise series of 33 prints is the third and final part of his epic project dedicated to Dante’s Divine Comedy, which in total includes 92 individual prints.

Paradiso describes Dante’s travels through space, guided by his great love, Beatrice. The etchings depict figures emerging into the light from the darkness of outer space. Printed on velvety black paper, each of these delicate etchings are inspired by the individual cantos (verses) of the book. The motifs radiate from the black paper in delicate and luminous colours, reflecting Dante’s journey circling the moon, the sun and the planets, detached from life on earth. With the same ease as Dante ascending into astronomical space, Tovborg depicts the souls he meets on his path towards God.