Tacita Dean - The Dante Project · One Hundred and Fifty Years of Painting

About

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.

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.