During a residency at the Menil Collection in Houston last February, the British artist and filmmaker Tacita Dean spent the night in the Cy Twombly Gallery.
She wanted to be surrounded by Twombly’s work, having long felt connected to the so-called Blackboard artist, who died in 2011, and in particular to his collage-drawings and preoccupation with the passage of time.
“He connects to the classical world in a way that is deeply emotive,” Dean said. “I’m interested in where your mind goes when you look at one of his works. It can go to memory, it can go to envy — you think, ‘God, that’s so perfect.’”
Now Dean is bringing her own monumental blackboard drawings and her rarely shown drawings on paper, found postcards, and albumen photographs to the Menil, in a show that opens on Oct. 11. The exhibition, “Tacita Dean: Blind Folly,” is her first major museum survey in the United States.
“The presence of Cy Twombly in Houston really ignited the show and the conversation,” said Michelle White, senior curator at the Menil, who organized the exhibition. “It just became such a lovely point of connection.”
In a recent interview at her Los Angeles studio, Dean, 58, said a focus on her drawings “is quite unusual for me,” given that shows typically focus on her films. And the artist said it is meaningful to be presenting her work in a place where Twombly’s presence is felt.
“His work short-circuits the connection to history and even to the gods themselves — I guess to literature,” she said. “It has the economy and directness of poetry.”
Dean has a long history with Twombly. In 1987, she was bowled over by a retrospective on the artist at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, organized by Nicholas Serota, then the director of the Tate.
“It blew my mind; it changed everything for me,” she said. “What he achieved in terms of connection with this other world, which is ineffable and beyond language.”
They finally met, briefly, in Rome in 2007, and she eventually became something of a specialist on Twombly, giving lectures, contributing to the catalog of his 2008 Tate Modern exhibition, and writing about his 1975 oil pastel and collage on paper, “Pan,” which features the word “Pan” below two crossed Swiss chard leaves. Her installation “GAETA (fifty photographs plus one)” was made in 2008 in Twombly’s house and studio in the Italian town of Gaeta. The images were first published as a photo essay in the catalog for Twombly’s 2009 exhibition in Vienna.
She made a short 2011 film about the artist, “Edwin Parker” (Twombly’s given name).
In 2021, her show “Sigh Sigh Sigh” in Rome featured a series of works relating to Twombly.
And early next year, MACK and the Menil will copublish Dean’s book on the artist, “Why Cy,” on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the opening of the Menil’s Cy Twombly Gallery.
“Dean, like Twombly, is fixated with time,” The Guardian wrote in 2011. “She has photographed a ruined modernist house on an overgrown island, filmed nuns eking out their days in a dying religious community, and recorded the last days of a Kodak factory.”
During her overnight visit to the Twombly gallery, Dean said she stayed up all night writing in a notebook and “started to do these crazy things with my camera,” creating images of the work on the walls around her.
“It’s Cy’s colors, it’s Cy’s paintings, but somehow they take on another format,” she said. “It wasn’t what I was expecting to do. But then, everything is like that with me.”
Her Menil show is called “Blind Folly” because “there is an aspect of blindness in what I do,” Dean said.
Rose Lord, a partner at the Marian Goodman Gallery, which has long represented Dean, said drawing underlies so much of her work.
“She has described her films as drawing with light,” Lord said. “Drawing is at the base of everything that she does.”
Born in Canterbury, England, Dean attended the Falmouth School of Art in Cornwall, the Supreme School of Fine Art in Athens and the Slade School of Fine Art in London.
Because of a residence at the Getty in 2014, she put down roots in Los Angeles, where she continues to appreciate her natural surroundings, though she also lives and works in Berlin. “It’s always interesting,” she said. “I love the sky and the clouds and the green.”
It was not until she began making slate drawings that she started to make any money, Dean said, “because the films don’t sell.”
While her work is collected by major museums such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Tate in London, she could not be called a market darling. Her auction high price is about $214,000, which is comparatively low, for “Wake (in 2 parts)” at Christie’s London in 2012.
Dean, however, said she doesn’t question making films. In fact, she has made film itself something of a cause, campaigning to save celluloid. She and the director Christopher Nolan did a series of public film discussions “Reframing the Future of Film,” including one at the Getty in 2015.
The artist is not easy to categorize. She designed the sets and costumes for the Royal Ballet’s “Dante Project” in 2021. She has worked with chalk on blackboard, colored pencil on paper, enamel on glass.
She likes drawing on alternative surfaces like slate, postcards and photographs. “I’ve never really been able to draw on a white piece of paper,” Dean said. “I’m more interested in patina.
“I can’t draw in front of people,” she added. “It’s a very solitary thing.”
This focused intensity and zest for experimentation reflects the intellectual curiosity that fuels Dean’s practice, art experts say, as well as her appreciation for the fleeting and ineffable. “She’s able to express this precarity,” Lord said. “It’s a beauty, but it’s a fragility at the same time.”
Dean’s work is timely, conveying a sensitivity to the natural world while also being “deeply humanist,” White, the Menil curator, said.
“It pushes against technological interfaces that are removing us further and further from what is real,” White added. “Her drawings — and the simple act of revealing that there is a human person making a mark on a surface in time — is both fundamental and profound.”
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