TACITA DEAN

The new limited edition, DANTE, includes the first recording of Thomas Adès’s score for the ballet and a photogravure by Dean, presented in a custom-made box. The double LP vinyl record set, released by Nonesuch Records and designed by Martyn Ridgewell, features artwork by Tacita Dean. The original musical score—referred to as ’an orchestral spectacular in this splendid recording’ in The Financial Times_,_ and considered ‘a dizzying homage to Liszt, synagogue music and the enchantingly upward infinity of the cosmos’ by The New York Times—was recorded by the Los Angeles Philharmonic under Gustavo Dudamel. Dean’s photogravure, printed by Borch Editions (Copenhagen) is made in the form of a 12-inch vinyl, shows a mountainous spiral drawn in negative, echoing the cold, upside-down, monumental mountains created for the backdrop of the first act of the ballet, Inferno.

A selection of prints by Dean accompanies the presentation of the limited edition and vinyl, which includes the original chalk drawing on blackboard paint on paper, Expulsion (2019) and the photogravure Expulsion from Paradise, (2020/2021) created by Dean while working on her cycle for The Dante Project. Paradise (2021), a series of 10 handmade colour silkscreen prints, through spheres and abstract forms, refer to the various celestial stages of Dante’s Paradiso. The motifs have been adapted from film frames from Dean’s 35mm anamorphic film, Paradise, projected in the final act of the ballet_._ Just like Paradiso, which is planetary and continuous, Dean experiments with pure light and colour as her subject in an entirely abstracted form, drawing her palette from the colours used by William Blake in his vivid watercolour illustrations of The Divine Comedy (1824).

Dean’s forthcoming and highly-anticipated solo show, Geography Biography, will be on view at the Bourse de Commerce - Pinault Collection from 24 May to 18 September 2023. The exhibition will feature a range of new works in multiple mediums, including a new 35mm portrait format anamorphic film diptych which will be presented in the Rotunda.

Thomas Adès is a composer, conductor, and pianist, born in London in 1971. His singular body of work is crowned by three critically acclaimed operas: Powder Her Face (1995), The Tempest (2004) and The Exterminating Angel (2016) as well as the ballet Dante (2019-20). The recipient of numerous awards, including the 2015 Léonie Sonning Music Prize and the 2000 Grawemeyer Award (for his 1997 orchestral work Asyla), Adès was Artistic Director of the Aldeburgh Festival for a decade and has conducted many of the world’s greatest orchestras, including Wiener Philharmoniker, Berliner Philharmoniker, Los Angeles Philharmonic, New York Philharmonic, and the London Symphony Orchestra. In 2016 he became the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s inaugural Artistic Partner with whom he premiered his Concerto for Piano and Orchestra with Kirill Gerstein as soloist in March 2019. He performs worldwide as a pianist, and coaches annually at the International Musicians Seminar, Prussia Cove.

Tacita Dean is a British European artist born in 1965 in Canterbury. She lives and works in Berlin and Los Angeles. Dean has been the recipient of numerous prizes including the Sixth Benesse Prize at the 51^st Venice Biennale in 2005, the Hugo Boss Prize at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2006 and the Kurt Schwitters Prize in 2009.