Tacita Dean

This solo exhibition, devoted to the work of acclaimed artist Tacita Dean (b. 1965, Canterbury) – the first of its kind in Luxembourg and the Greater Region – presents new and recent works including films, drawings, and large-scale photographs. The exhibition will feature a trilogy of works designed for the upcoming production of the Royal Ballet in London called The Dante Project, which was inspired by Dante Alighieri’s (b. 1265, Florence; d. 1321, Ravenna) Divine Comedy.

Tacita Dean’s work is informed by a sense of time and place, subject and history and a respect for nature. The sea, sky and mountains are recurrent motifs within her large-scale chalk drawings on blackboards. These works, which convey the transience of natural phenomena, serve as metaphors for memory. Dean’s works on 16 mm and 35 mm film, for which she is best known, are often characterised by their long static shots, which capture the density of a moment and reveal the inner world of artists. Merce Cunningham, Cy Twombly, David Hockney and Mario Merz have all been the subjects of Dean’s films. Her work since 2006 has also addressed the disappearance of analogue technologies, including the reduced use of photochemical film and the implications of this for contemporary culture. For Dean digital technologies promote archives of unedited mass: ‘A world that won’t forget is a world drowned in its not forgetting’.

The new works that Dean has created for The Dante Project come out of a collaboration with choreographer Wayne McGregor and composer Thomas Adès. A large-scale chalk drawing, a photography-based work and a 35 mm abstract film describe Dante’s epic journey through the afterlife and the worlds of the Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso. Presented as a journey through mediums, it evolves from negative to positive, from representation to abstraction, and from black- and-white to colour. This trilogy of works will be accompanied by One Hundred and Fifty Years of Painting (2021), a filmed conversation between artists Luchita Hurtado (b. 1920, Caracas; d. 2020, Santa Monica) and Julie Mehretu (b. 1970, Addis-Abeba), made as a result of the coincidence of their birthdays exactly 50 years apart. This film is the centrepiece around which the second half of the exhibition is curated.