TACITA DEAN

Designed as ‘an exhibition in a box,’ Monet Hates Me is an edition of one hundred clothbound and foil embossed boxes, each containing fifty objects, some unique to each box.

The source material was found by Tacita Dean in the Getty Research Institute Special Collections in Los Angeles while she was artist-in-residence in 2014–2015. Her research project at the Getty was entitled ‘The importance of objective chance as a tool of research,’ which meant allowing chance to guide her research in Special Collections. On her first visit to the collection, she pointed randomly to a cardboard box on a high shelf, which turned out to contain the key to Auguste Rodin’s studio entrance in Hôtel Biron.

During the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns between March and December 2020, Dean worked with her longtime friend and collaborator Martyn Ridgewell. Working remotely in Berlin and Cornwall, they designed and produced the objects, often sourcing materials and facilities locally. As a result, many of the objects are not commercially produced but made by hand.

Among the fifty objects is a vinyl record of Dean reading a montage of text fragments collated from her working photocopies, ‘a foot of feet’—a foot long strip of film made of sixteen frames of found images of feet, a poster, an etching, a screenprint, a carte de visite, a postcard, a cyantype and a newspaper. The edition also includes several handprinted photochemical photographs and is signed and numbered in the front of Object 1: a small book, which acts as the key to the provenance and manufacture of the other forty-nine objects.

The title Monet Hates Me comes from a letter to Camille Pissarro from Claude Monet where a fragment of his handwriting appears to say ‘hate tacita.’

Monet Hates Me is published by the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, in association with Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König, Cologne.

Tacita Dean is a British European artist born in 1965 in Canterbury. She lives and works in Berlin and Los Angeles. Well-known for her analogue films, photography, printmaking and drawing, 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, New York, in 2006 and the Kurt Schwitters Prize in 2009.

Solo exhibitions were recently held at EMMA - Espoo Museum of Modern Art, Finland (2020); the NY Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen, Denmark (2019); Moody Center for the Arts, Houston, Texas (2019); Serralves Museum, Porto, Portugal (2019); Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria (2018); The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, Scotland (2018).

In 2018, she made history when her exhibition, LANDSCAPE, PORTRAIT, STILL LIFE, took place simultaneously across three London museums: Royal Academy of Arts, National Portrait Gallery and The National Gallery.

In 2011, Dean produced the work, FILM, as part of the Unilever Series of Tate Modern; the work shown in the Turbine Hall marked the beginning of their campaign to preserve photochemical film.

In 2019, Dean was commissioned to create the set design and costumes for The Dante Project, a new ballet with a new composition by conductor-composer Thomas Adès and choreography by Royal Ballet’s resident choreographer Wayne McGregor, set to premiere at the London Royal Opera House in October 2021.

Upcoming exhibitions include Antigone at Kunstmuseum Basel opening August 2021 and a solo show at Marian Goodman Gallery in New York, from 7 September to 9 October 2021.