Tacita Dean

We were in Houston, Texas a couple of weeks ago with an afternoon free, so we decided to go to The Menil Collection. In 1954 John and Dominique de Menil established a foundation whose stated purpose was “to foster greater public understanding and appreciation of art, architecture, culture, religion, and philosophy”. The museum, beautiful in its simplicity, built to house their collection by the famed architect Renzo Piano, opened in 1987.

It is designed with pods usually consisting of 2 exhibition rooms each. When we were there, in one was a wonderful show by surrealist Max Ernst and another of ancient as well as indigenous arts. However, what especially grabbed us on this visit was the exhibition of a contemporary artist, Tacita Dean.

Clearly, we are not with it, as they say, because the artist was new to us. Ms. Dean is represented, for one, by the esteemed Marian Goodman Gallery. Dean was born in 1965 in Canterbury, England and the biography sent me by the Gallery refers to her as “British European”. Today she splits her time between Los Angeles and Berlin. She received her MFA in painting from The Slade School of Fine Art in London. There is a long list of awards and solo exhibitions going back to 1994. In 1992 she created a 16mm, 16 mm, color, optical sound, 8 minutes; continuous loop called The Story of Beard.

This exhibit at The Menil is her first major museum survey in the U.S. though she has had shows at the National Gallery, The National Portrait Gallery and the Royal Academy in London, and also in Basel, Switzerland, in Mexico City and Sydney, Australia.

The show we saw was called “Blind Folly”. A short pamphlet that is available in the exhibition has a quote from the artist which says in part, “I have allowed the making of my work to be open to interpretation and redirection by chance …” and that is what I found particularly intriguing. My wife and I saw different but similar things in the works.

There was much more to the show than I will give examples of here, but these are images that really struck me. A fantastic (including all of that word’s meanings) work is The Montafon Letter, 2017, lent by the Glenstone Museum, Potomac, Maryland. It looks to be a photograph but it is actually a white chalk drawing on black board. It measures 12 by 24 feet. Montafon is a 39 km long valley in the westernmost Austrian federal state of Vorarlberg and Dean’s image is a scene of its icy Alpine peaks. The artist says she based it on an account of a fatal 17th century avalanche in the Austrian Alps in which 300 people died and one priest survived making it a symbol of hope. The story goes on and may be historically interesting, but for me, who lives in the mountains of New Mexico and has loved Switzerland since I was a child, I prefer to see mountains and not tragedy. Here you will see the image in the installation and a photograph of the work alone. (images gallery shot Montafon 1 and image solo Montafon 2)

One of my wife’s favorite works was the Delfern Tondo, 2024. Delfern refers to an estate in Los Angeles. The work is 10 feet in diameter and again looks like a photo but is not. It is chalk on blackboard and paint on Formica. In preparation, however, the artist did lie on the grass and point her camera upwards for inspiration. Living outside of town we often look up but at night we do not see clearly the cloud patterns we are able to see during the day. Dean evokes those magical moments that are so difficult if not impossible to capture with a camera. The close up is from the frontispiece to the catalog.

An image that the curator, Michelle White clearly loves since it is the cover of the museum brochure, and the press release, is “Beauty 2006” lent by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. It represents a barren tree. Here Dean did use a photograph blown up to roughly 12 by 12 feet but she isolated the tree from its surroundings and enhanced its image by painting in gouache with a small brush around its limbs. This was one of her first in a series of what is called in the catalog “portraits of trees”, sometimes in color, that she found in different locations around the world. (image Beauty, 2006)

This is such a multifaceted artist! Dean has made 16mm films which are being shown in rotation at The Menil. She believes in creating works with found objects and her unusual surfaces include abandoned locomotive windows. One series in the show is composed of found postcards where she has painted mirror images to mount next to them. I was tantalized by the thoughts she left in partially erased notes in her larger drawings. She says she does not know what she will create until she serendipitously sees and does it. How do you capture that?

The exhibition will be on view at The Menil until April 19, 2025.