Business Finance Media Technology Policy Wealth Insights Interviews

Art Art Fairs Art Market Art Reviews Auctions Galleries Museums Interviews

Lifestyle Nightlife & Dining Style Travel Interviews

Power Index Nightlife & Dining Art A.I. PR

About About Observer Advertise With Us Reprints

The Blind Folly of Tacita Dean

At the Columbus Museum of Art, the artist expands the definition of drawing, turning fragile materials and found objects into monumental meditations on time and loss.

Serendipitous connections happen to each of us all the time. Whether we are conscious and receptive to them is another matter. The British artist Tacita Dean builds her work from these blind circumstances and chance encounters. The Surrealist André Breton called them hasard objectif, objective chance, “based on a state of expectancy… a flaneur awaiting a disruption of the surface of life.” Dean is no good with a blank piece of paper, but give her a letter, old train windows or a W. G. Sebald novel, and she is off and running, creating work that is exactingly original. In 2024, while she was in residence at the Menil Collection in Houston, she spent a night alone in the Cy Twombly Gallery. Later, wandering through a junk shop, she found a file of vintage postcards labeled Disasters. The second card she pulled out showed a house destroyed by a cyclone, the word Cyclone written in script that looked like her own handwriting. The first two letters were painted in white, bolder than the rest.

Sign Up For Our Daily Newsletter

Thank you for signing up!

By clicking submit, you agree to our terms of service and acknowledge we may use your information to send you emails, product samples, and promotions on this website and other properties. You can opt out anytime.

The postcard became part of her exhibition at the Menil, “Blind Folly,” which has now traveled to the Columbus Museum of Art in Columbus, Ohio. It took me three hours to see the entire show, not only because it is extensive but also because her work is so unusual that it takes time to grasp what she is doing. Take the monumental blackboard drawing The Montafon Letter. It spans an entire wall at the museum, more than 12 feet high and 24 feet across. The........

© Observer