Tacita Dean Master

The four pieces that make up Tacita Dean’s Telomere 1–4 are photogravures that include direct gravure and screen-printed colour elements. The images have their origin in the impressions created by the wear and tear on a square enamelled metal plate used as a ramp by the artist’s gallery in Paris.

Dean describes Telomere 1­–4 as a ‘found mark project’, where she traced, copied, and accumulated the scratches over the four prints. She found the word ‘telomere’, which are the sections at the end of a chromosome, when she searched “attrition through accumulation” on the internet. As cells divide in the ageing process, the telomeres get shorter.

Working with BORCH Editions, Dean added to the prints for over a year, seeing in the marks the potential for other narratives. Using collaged paper cut-outs, screen-printed motifs and colour directly applied onto the plate, Telomere 1–4 have continued to collect history in a way not dissimilar to the enamelled sheet that was their origin.

Each of the four Telomere prints consists of three layers: the first layer is printed in black from a photogravure plate combining a very high-resolution photographic image of the marks and scratches on the metal ramp, combined with Tacita Dean’s hand-made tracings and drawings. The second layer consists only of hand-made marks transferred to a photogravure plate (direct gravure), printed in a range of colours. In the final layer, a selection of hand-made marks was screen-printed onto the surface of the prints with glossy ink.

Tacita Dean made Telomere 1–4 as part of her exhibition Geography Biography for the Pinault Collection at Bourse de Commerce in Paris 2023.

The ten-metre print, made in eight parts, shows Dante and Virgil’s descent into Hell as described by Dante Alighieri in his Divine Comedy, 1321. The prints show an inverted mountainscape in negative inscribed with text, marks, splashes, and collaged elements. The source is a found image: 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 the 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. Dean has also experimented with embedding collaged elements into the gravure process for the first time.

The vast print project relates to Dean’s stage and costume design for Inferno, part of The Dante Project, a commissioned ballet based on the Divine Comedy with music by Thomas Adès and choreography by Wayne McGregor.

Antigone (offset), 2021 is a set of prints by Tacita Dean, who selected stills from her double 35mm Cinemascope film work Antigone, 2018 and printed them as 8 pairs of offset lithographs.

Antigone, a central figure of mythology, is also the name of Dean’s older sister and therefore closely related to the artist’s own story and probably one of the first words the artist ever learnt. In the film Antigone, Dean created a visual tale around the concept of blindness rooted in the destiny of Antigone’s father/brother Oedipus, the king of Thebes, who blinds himself after unwittingly killing his father and marrying his own mother Jocasta. Oedipus’s self-imposed punishment ends the first play in the Sophoclean Theban trilogy, Oedipus Rex, when Oedipus banishes himself from Thebes. At the beginning of the second play, Oedipus at Colonus, the blind man arrives at Colonus accompanied by his daughter Antigone, who has guided him through years of restless wandering in the wilderness.

Dean’s Antigone is concerned with the intervening years between the two plays. The film is structured around a solar eclipse and features writer and poet Anne Carson and actor Stephen Dillane. The latter, performs the role of the blinded Oedipus by wearing eclipse glasses. Anne Carson recites her poem TV Men: Antigone (Scripts 1 and 2) about the same gap between the plays.
Like eyes, the offset lithographs are paired as diptychs, replicating the double projection in Antigone. The film was created through a process of masking, and multiple layers of exposure, which meant that Dean was unable to see what she had filmed until she printed the negative months after she began:

“So Antigone was instructed by blindness: my own creative blindness, the blindness of Oedipus and the cosmic blindness found in nature in the form of the total eclipse of the sun. But most especially Antigone has taken form as a result of the inherent blindness of film. Using masking inside the camera’s aperture gate, I filmed one part of the film frame before rewinding the camera to film another part. This meant that the film was composed without the possibility of seeing what was already exposed in the frame.”

–Tacita Dean

Tacita Dean created the large-scale colour photogravure Quarantania specifically for her 2018 exhibition Tacita Dean: LANDSCAPE, PORTRAT, STILL LIFE, an unprecedented collaboration between the National Gallery, National Portrait Gallery and Royal Academy of Arts in London.

The mountain depicted in the desert landscape in Quarantania is Jebel Quarantul or the Mount of Temptation, the ‘high place’ referenced in the Bible where Jesus was taken by the devil and offered dominion over ‘all the kingdoms of the world’ if he fell down and worshipped Satan. The name is derived from the Latin word for forty; the number of days Christ fasted in the wilderness.

Tacita Dean frequently uses found images to compose unlikely imaginary landscapes as large-scale photogravure works. The images are overlaid with fragments of handwritten text that provide narrative possibilities while at the same time including overwritten or erased words that resist any attempt to decipher them. Dean found the 1870’s albumen print of Mount Quarantania over a decade ago and was immediately attracted by the strange beauty of the mountain as well as the striking clarity and detail of the early print, photographed just prior to the construction of the nineteenth century Greek Orthodox monastery now perched on the rock face. Using the image in combination with other found albumens and a more radical use of colour, she chose to create an hallucinogenic scape as pathetic fallacy for Christ’s state of mind after forty days without food, summoning up a fata morgana as contemporary metaphor for the delusion of dominion and power in an age of political temptation and the dissolution of all norms of restraint.

The Yellowstone supervolcano is a blister of a volcano, which has no release. Magma has been gathering beneath the park’s crust for millennia, the surface is noticeably rising and steaming. If the pressure became so great that the ground would be wrenched apart, the resulting explosion would wipe out several states instantaneously, covering the rest of the world with an ash cloud so dense that it would block out the sun and cause an ice age. The human species would become extinct.

Dean has been collecting albumen photographs from the end of the 19th Century for some time. Made by adventurous photographers excited by the new art form, they are beautiful creamy prints of geysers and igneous formations exhaling steam and ejecting sulphuric vapours. Dean combined several of these albumen photographs into a post-megacalderic apocalypse where volcanic cones are gateways to Hell and where the sun is lost to ash. But like all mise-en-scène, it is subject to continuity errors.

Tacita Dean’s Quatemary combines procedures from two earlier large-scale photogravures, Fernweh (2009) and More or Less (2011). Partly chalk drawing on blackboard like More or Less, partly text and drawing over a photographic landscape, like Fernweh, the different techniques were joined into one seamless image in a technically demanding process.

JG is inspired by Tacita Dean’s correspondence with British author J.G. Ballard regarding connections between Robert Smithson’s iconic earthwork and film Spiral Jetty (1970) and J.G. Ballard’s short story The Voices of Time (1960). JG is a visually stunning, elliptical interpretation of a speculative conversation between Ballard, Smithson, and Dean that reaches across decades and disciplines. The film was shot at six different sites in the saline landscapes of Utah and Southern California.

‘Sitting talking with Cy Twombly in The Lexington Restaurant after filming Edwin Parker, it came up that I was afraid of flying but had to do it anyway to be the artist I was. He said that when he was young, his mother watched him fret over his painting. She said one day: ‘Why do you do it if it makes you so anxious? Why don’t you do something that makes you happy?’ I said, ‘Does painting make you happy now?’ ‘More or less,’ he replied.

Earlier in that same week, I had met Leo Steinberg. On the plane over I read his essay, The Line of Fate in Michelangelo’s Painting. He had found by studying many subsequent versions of The Last Judgement that the copyists appeared to ‘correct’ what they saw as compositional flaws in the original painting and that this guided Steinberg to the real intent of Michelangelo. He found what he describes as a deliberate but notional line running diagonally from the top left apex of the lunettes of Heaven through the cut in Christ’s side, down through the tormented face of the sinner to Minos’s genitals at the bottom right–hand corner of Hell. At its exact centre Michelangelo had painted himself – a self-portrait – his own face appearing on the flayed skin of St Bartholomew. To Leo Steinberg, Michelangelo had chosen to place himself at the centre of Judgement, equidistant from Heaven and Hell – the artist as humanity judged.

As a student in my final year at The Slade, I started to photograph the changes I was making on a single blackboard on the wall in my working space. Eventually I turned the sixteen small dark prints into a work for my final show. Then they got lost. Years later, they were found in a roll in a disbanded studio and I could see how very little I had changed and that it made sense to show them again.

All three of these incidents conspired to make More or Less. I carried the title – still empty – from Lexington and tried again to repeat the process behind Sixteen Blackboards by teasing myself into making a drawing that came from the surface and the depths, and what kept appearing were the diagonal and the line of fate.’

– Tacita Dean

Tacita Dean’s FILM stills stem from her 2011 work FILM, commissioned to be exhibited in the Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern. FILM stills’ primary focus is the exploration of film both as medium and as object. Incited by the riddle-like allegory of René Daumal’s novel Mount Analogue (1952), a vast mountain only visible to those who believe in its existence, FILM (and in extension FILM stills) beckons the viewer to become a believer. Believing herself in the analogue (versus digital), and in the handcraft of film, Dean wrote that with this work she strove to “revive spontaneity and risk,” showing “film as film can be.”

Tacita Dean’s Craneway Event captures moments and auras from a rehearsal for one of the last events the choreographer Merce Cunningham would create for his dance company. Each print, based on a still from the film Dean made over the course of three days with the company in Albert Kahn’s 1930s Ford assembly plant in Richmond, California, overlooking San Francisco Bay, expresses movement. The series forms a moving portrait of one of the most influential choreographers of the 20th century. But it also reflects the special perspective which the artist brings to all her subjects. Dean’s unique treatment of the prints creates a dialogue between dancers, architecture, sunlight, and passing ships, delicately moderated by the tranquil, forceful presence of Merce Cunningham, just months before his death.

‘Finding a path amongst the vegetation and boulders of the photographic distortions, I imagined Goethe’s voyage to Italy, particularly his parcours south of Rome on his way to Naples.’ – Tacita Dean

Fernweh is an improbable landscape made of cliffs, forest and dunes, created from four small discoloured nineteenth century photographs Tacita Dean found in flea markets. The horizon is a famous outcrop, called Sächsische Schweiz – Saxony’s Switzerland, near Dresden. The foreground is unknown sand and scrub.

The German expression ‘Fernweh’ describes a longing to travel, an aching to get away, unlike ‘Wanderlust’, which is a more spirited desire to be in the landscape. It is the etymological opposite of ‘Heimweh’, which means homesickness. ‘We do not have a single word in English for this more considered desire to be gone,’ Dean explains. ‘This work should be approached through its title.’

Before the Hessen State Museum in Darmstadt restored the Block Beuys (1949–1972), the last installation of works put together by Joseph Beuys himself, Tacita Dean had the opportunity to document the vacant rooms with her camera. Her approach stands in close relation to Beuys’ own work: She focuses on the spatial details and the wall coverings’ patches and flaws. Darmstädter Werkblock consists of eight photogravures, depicting Dean’s very own perspective on Beuys’ intense microcosm.

In her monumental photogravure project T & I, Tacita Dean addresses themes of collective memory and lost history by combining the romantic legend of ill-fated medieval lovers Tristan and Isolde, whose initials give this piece its title, with the real-life tragedy of British sailor Donald Crowhurst. Dean often uses the sea and other maritime themes in her work, including the tale of Crowhurst, which has appeared in several of her projects.

In 1968 Crowhurst sailed from England for a solo, round-the-world yacht race and never returned. In T & I Dean connects the tale of this lost sailor to the story of Tristan and Isolde—whose tragic love story also hinges on sea voyages—through her majestic depiction of a barren, rocky coastline looking seaward. This work, based on a found postcard, includes the white, cryptic notes that Dean often scribbles on her prints and drawings. Here the musings include ‘start’ and ‘stage 4,’ clear theatrical directions, as well as fragments of a poem by ‘WSG’ about an artist killed in an accident. The twenty-five-sheet composition suggests a cinematic narrative sequence, while reading it as a unified image has a breath-taking, visionary impact. The rich velvety texture of the photogravure medium contributes a nineteenth-century patina that is ideally suited to the intensity and foreboding melancholy of the subject.

Tacita Dean’s photogravure series Palast comprises a sequence of still shots from her film of the same name, angled at the reflective surfaces of bronze-mirrored windows on the Palast der Republik, or the Palace of the Republic, a government building opened in 1976 in former East Berlin serving primarily as the seat of the German Democratic Republic parliament. The imposing structure with its 180 metres of windowed facade embodied the architectural style of the socialist government – it was named ‘the house of a thousand windows’. Dean looks at the building close up, giving no sense of its vast scale. She focuses on the visual effects of changing light and reflections of surrounding buildings as the sun sets.
For years the building had been the topic of a heated debate; some wanted to destroy the symbol of the old hated regime, and rebuild the old Stadtschloss palace which was once located on the same site; others believed the building should be preserved as a remainder of the city’s eventful history. The Palast der Republik was demolished in 2006–8.

Tacita Dean’s photogravure series Blind Pan is a near-black silhouette of what appears to be high, blasted moorland with the words ‘The Road to Colonnus’, spread sequentially over five large frames across which chalk words take the form of stage directions for Oedipus’ and Antigone’s journey through the wilderness, resembling a storyboard for an unmade film.

Tacita Dean’s film Fernsehturm takes its name from Berlin’s iconic television tower in Alexanderplatz, which was erected in the 1960s and was intended by the city’s Socialist Unity Party to be a monument to the future of the German Democratic Republic. The tower serves as the setting of Dean’s atmospheric film, which is comprised of a forty-four minute static shot looking across the tower’s restaurant interior, towards a curved wall of windows that allow diners to observe the city while they eat.

Dean has created six photogravure prints based on film stills, which record the slowly changing light of the rotating restaurant. As twilight falls and the light fades before deepening and blackening, the forms of the restaurant interior fluctuate between visibility and obscurity until the fluorescent lights are switched on, transforming the window surfaces from transparent glass to reflecting screens.

born 1965 in Canterbury, England lives and works in Berlin, London, and Los Angeles. She has been collaborating with BORCH Editions since 2001.

Recent solo exhibitions of her work include, among others, MCA Australia (2023/24), Bourse de Commerce, Pinault Collection, Paris (2023); MUDAM, Luxembourg (2022), the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles (2021); Kunstmuseum Basel (2021) ; Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen (2019), Kunsthaus Bregenz (2018), and the Royal Academy of Arts, National Gallery and National Portrait Gallery, London (2017).

Her work is part of numerous renowned public collections; the printmaking projects she realized with BORCH Editions have been acquired by the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; The British Museum, London; The Tate Collection, London; Schaulager Basel; Berlinische Galerie, Berlin; The Federal Republic of Germany’s Contemporary Art Collection, Berlin; Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main; Staatsgalerie Stuttgart; Museumslandschaft Hessen, Kassel; the National Gallery of Denmark, Copenhagen; and Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark, among others.