Cathy's Art Diary

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 b...

Charming display at the National Portrait Gallery as part of the Tacita Dean: Portraits exhibition which I missed on my first visit to that show as it was not with the main show.   This was room looked at the idea of miniature portraits with the title taken from Hamlet where Hamlet refers to the escalating value of “portraits in little” of his uncle when he became king. For this reason there was a portrait of Shakespeare in the room along with those of Donne and Drayton who also mention miniatures in their work.   The miniatures were shown to reflect the literary world of the time with a picture of one of the brothers to whom the First Folio is dedicated and the Earl of Derby, the earliest court patron of the stage.   In the midst of this was a small scale Tacita Dean video of David Warner, Stephen Dilliane and Ben Whishaw, all of whom have played Hamlet. Oddly compared to the miniatures the film felt rather out of focus and misty however it was a nice m...

Two contrasting exhibitions at the National Gallery and National Portrait Gallery curated by and looking at work by Tacita Dean. 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 ...