Tacita Dean: Still Life and Portrait
I would normally
blog these as two separate shows but the reviewers have discussed them together
and I did make a point of seeing them one after the other so I’m going to
follow suit although they were quite different.
I loved the Still
Life show at the National Gallery. It was curated by Dean although it included
some of her work. She’s picked examples of still lives from the gallery’s
collection although she took a broad dentition of still life including pictures
of stillness such as the tiny Thomas Jones picture of Naples. The works were
shown with minimal commentary just basic labels and you were left to make your
own connections. I found this approach made me slow down and really look at the
pictures. It also had a mindfulness effect. Delightful narratives were set up such as showing the Barberi sparrow hawk
with a Gwen John of a bird cage and a video of Dean’s shown high up in the room
of a bird on a telegraph wire.
However I found
the portrait exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery annoying and too time
consuming if you wanted to see the work properly. All the work was by Dean and
tended to be slow, carefully observed video of studies of people. They were
similar to Sam Taylor Wood’s David which I love but I found these on mass to be
rather tedious. I also got annoyed that a lot of them were shown from
projectors that were sited quite low so that anyone entering the room cast
shadows across the screen. I loved the idea of the last room with six screens
showing Merce Cunningham however the multiple shadows became very irritating. I
suspect seeing yourself and others in the picture might have been part of the
point but I didn’t like it.
I will find it
interesting to see the third show in this series, landscape, which is due to
open at the Royal Academy soon.
Closes on 28 May
2018
Reviews
Times Guardian
Telegraph
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