Tacita Dean : Landscape

Beautiful exhibition at the Royal Academy of landscape work by Tacita Dean.

This was the third in a series of Tacita Dean shows this year with Still Life at the National Gallery and Portraits at the National Portrait Gallery. I’d loved the still life one but not been so sure about portraits. I thought this was the best of the three. She took landscape in the broad sense of work on the outdoors and covered both the sublime and the picturesque.


I loved a display of four plus leaf clovers that Dean had collected over the years and is still collecting. Laid out against a white background these looked so fragile. I loved the dense ‘hang’ to start with that petered out to one or two in each section of the case. I wasn’t so sure of the video, “Antigone” as it was too long and seemed difficult to dip into. I couldn’t give it long enough to understand the themes.

My favourite pieces were the chalk drawings on black boards as, again, I loved the fragility of them. I’m sure they’ve been fixed but they look like you could swipe across them and they’d be gone. I particularly love the large nine panel work “The Montafon” a wonderful picture of a mountain which takes up the whole wall and dominated the room.


 
Closes on 12 August 2018
 
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