Location

Country: UK
City: London
Place: The Secret Intelligence Service, Vauxhall Cross, Albert Embankment

Tacita Dean’s Foreign Policy (screenprint edition) reflects both an ongoing series of works and a very specific moment in time. A self-declared collector of clouds, Dean began this body of work in 2014 following her move from Berlin to u2028Los Angeles. She describes a seminal encounter with a ‘voluminous atomic cloud blooming’ across Sunset Boulevard ‘on pure azure without transitional haze nor other, lesser clouds for company’. Since declaring California as ‘the place for clouds’, the artist has drawn them in chalk on blackboards and spray chalk on slates, ‘found them on postcards, painted round them, photographed and printed them.’

This screenprint is an interpretation of a similarly titled large-scale work drawn in chalk on blackboard from 2016. Foreign Policy simultaneously evokes the challenge of capturing the mutability of clouds and an epoch of unprecedented global change and uncertainty. The title shifts the subject of a cloud, whose ‘identity’ is challenging to capture, to a thought-provoking reflection on global relations. The cloud, whose symbolism gives us both dark warnings and silver linings, is universal and yet defined and shaped by its environment. 

Dean was the second artist to be awarded The Robson Orr TenTen Award by the Government Art Collection (GAC) in 2019. Produced jointly by the GAC with Outset Contemporary Art Fund, this ten-year initiative is sponsored by leading philanthropists Sybil Robson Orr and Matthew Orr.

Tacita Dean CBE, RA (b. 1965) is a British visual artist who works primarily in film within a multidisciplinary practice encompassing drawing, painting and photography. She was a nominee for the Turner Prize in 1998, won the Hugo Boss Prize in 2006, and was elected to the Royal Academy of Arts in 2008. The year 2018 cemented Dean’s reputation as one of the UK’s foremost artists to have emerged in the 1990s, as the National Portrait Gallery, Royal Academy and The National Gallery collaborated u2028to present LANDSCAPE, PORTRAIT, STILL LIFE, three separate exhibitions dedicated to the different genres in her oeuvre. She was artist-in-residence at the Getty Research Institute in 2014-2015, and lives and works between Los Angeles, Berlin and the UK.

Places

Subjects

weather & elements, cloud, storm, international relations, foreign policy

Materials & Techniques

paper (as artists material), print (as object name), screenprint

Artist

Tacita Dean (1965 - )

Title

Foreign Policy (screenprint edition)

Series Title

TenTen

Edition

Number 7 in an edition of 32 plus 6 artist’s proofs

Date

2019

Medium

screenprint on paper

Dimensions

height: 80 cm; width: 80 cm

Acquisition

Commissioned by the Government Art Collection for The Robson Orr TenTen Award 2019, a GAC/Outset Annual Commission

GAC number

18824/6