Tacita Dean: L.A. Magic Hour

SHAHEEN is delighted to present L.A. Magic Hour, a suite of fifteen recent lithographs by British artist Tacita Dean. Working across a broad spectrum of media over the course of her career to date, TacitaDean has made nature one of the key thematic considerations of her larger oeuvre, frequently employing images of trees, oceans, clouds, the landscape and other natural phenomena as recurring visual elements in her work. The lithographs that comprise Dean's "L.A. Magic Hour" depict the shifting colors and tones of the Los Angeles sky in its various stages of sunset, as she guides the viewer from the pale oranges and yellow tinged blues of its onset all the way through to the fiery magentas of its final moments. Working from a selection of previously executed spray chalk drawings of the Los Angeles sky, the artist flipped, rotated and inverted the imagery to arrive at the desired compositions for the lithographs. Through a complex technique of layering
transparent and semi-opaque colors, Dean collaborated with master printer Jill Lerner to graft colors from her vast catalogue of photographic imagery of southern California sunsets onto those compositions. Devoid of any fixed horizon line, the resulting fifteen works appear effortlessly diffuse and luminous, capturing atmospheric space through a balance of blended and contrasting swaths of vivid color. Though each image that makes up L.A. Magic Hour is specific to the Los Angeles sunset, and represents a single moment in time and the artist's imagination, the series as a whole strikes a strong collective chord, capturing the universality of watching the sun set, and the passage of time and eternal mutability of the sky that define that experience.

Born in Canterbury, England in 1965. Tacita Dean studied in the painting departments at Falmouth School of Art in Cornwall and the Slade School of Fine Art in London. Known internationally for her work in 16mm film, drawing, photography and printmaking, among other media, Dean has been awarded numerous prestigious prizes, including the Hugo Boss Prize (2006) and the Kurt Schwitters Prize (2009), and was a 1998 nominee for Great Britain's Turner Prize. Her work has been the subject of dozens of solo museum exhibitions worldwide, including the Kunstmuseum, Basel; Serralves Museum, Porto, Portugal; National Gallery, London; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Albright Knox Gallery, Buffalo; the Tate Modern, London; and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY. Her work is included in dozens of major museum collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, NY; Art Institute of Chicago; Israel Museum, Jerusalem; and Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, among many others.