|
Dorothea Tanning
Emotion II, 1988
Collage
with watercolour, graphite and crayon on black
paper
Image
size 63.5 x 48.3 cm / 25 x 19 in
Courtesy
of Alison Jacques Gallery, London
DOROTHEA TANNING
29 June
- 28 July 2012
Dorothea Tanning was one of the
most compelling artists of the twentieth century, making an
inexhaustible contribution to the arts in the fields of
painting, sculpture, printmaking and poetry. This
presentation, the first in Europe since her passing earlier
this year at the age of 101 years old, looks beyond the field
of Surrealist painting for which Tanning is best known,
exploring her compositions on paper. Displaying her early
collages and wall reliefs, as well as her more intricate
collages of the 1980s, the exhibition provides a unique
insight into one lesser-known aspect of Tanning's practice. In
these images, Tanning often refers to erotic, biomorphic and
animal forms, intertwining these with textured paper or fabric
segments to create abstract, fractured and dark dream-like
spaces. These paper and fabric collages elucidate her
exploration of nightmarish landscapes, her wry sense of humour
and her devotion to the reinvention of the human body in art.
Dorothea Tanning: Collages brings together a rarely seen body
of work by this multifaceted artist, whose career expanded
across six decades, drawing further attention to this little
known and under appreciated aspect of her work. This
exhibition was organised with Dorothea Tanning's support and
it brings us great sadness that she did not live to see it
realized. It is however, a privilege to be able to show these
collages which reveal an intimate side to Tanning's
practice.
Paper
works dating from the 1970s and '80s are exhibited along with
her earlier and more humorous photographic collages dating
from as early as 1945 and assemblage pieces dating from as
late as 2005. The parallels between Tanning's earlier and
later collages offer a contextual insight into how she
pioneered and developed the use of this technique. One of the
earlier works is a photomontage of a chess tournament at the
Julien Levy Gallery and includes Tanning and her husband Max
Ernst. All participants were unsuccessfully competing against
a blindfolded chess-master, while Marcel Duchamp called out
the players' moves. This series of photographs is curiously
superimposed with an upside-down ivy branch, reminiscent of
burning flames, which alludes to the intensity of this
encounter. Another early work dating from 1967 is The Artist
as Dog, a playful montage of a photograph of Tanning's beloved
dog laid over a photographic self-portrait of the artist lying
on a chaise longue.
Although Tanning first began wittily exploring
collage in the late 1940s, it wasn't until the late 1980s that
she considered this medium as a more focused strand of her art
production. The 1970s and '80s saw a culmination of Tanning's
career as she moved away from narrative Surrealism and started
further exploring elements of the Dada movement such as the
use of found materials like dried plants, newspaper,
photographs and Xeroxes. The combination of her new style,
with the more traditional Surrealist influence lead to a
greater complexity in her work. While some works such as Glad
Nude with Paws (1978) incorporate a surprising collage element
within a painted or drawn image, by the mid 1980s Tanning
started investigating the possibilities that the materials
available to her in her studio could provide. Recycling ripped
remnants of her own watercolours and combining them with torn
pieces of tracing and coloured paper and fabric swatches that
evoke her cloth sculptures, she created intriguing abstract
and aesthetically modern collages that blur the boundaries
between the conventional categories of media. In works such as
Emotion II (1988) Tanning's multiuse of appropriated
materials, such as pieces from her preparatory colour tests
and flowings from her watercolours became more obvious.
Emotion II and Who Else (1988) also exemplify Tanning's
recurrent use of the female form, seamlessly floating in a
silent but sensual interrelationship with its abstract
surroundings. In the latter piece, the female figure is Susan
Sontag, a long-time literary icon and friend of Tanning's,
overlaid with cryptic words written in white chalk creating a
fascinating dialogue between their work. The human hand, which
is present in this work and appears in several of Tanning's
collages, is another example of how she uses and
re-appropriates the body in her work. Historically, the hand
has traditional and pre-historic connections with art
production, sometimes appearing tied up leading to darker and
more complex interpretations. Tanning's inventive use of
photocopies of her own hand in her collages is both remarkable
and indicative of her pioneering spirit.
Dorothea Tanning was born in Galesburg, Illinois
(1910), and died in New York (January 2012). Major solo museum
exhibitions included Dorothea Tanning: Oeuvre a retrospective,
Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (1974); Dorothea Tanning: Works
1942-1992, Camden Arts Center, London (1993); Dorothea
Tanning: If Art Could Talk, Malmö Konsthall, Malmo, Sweden
(1993); and Birthday and Beyond, Philadelphia Museum of Art
(2000). Notable group shows include Exhibition by 31 Women at
Peggy Guggenheim's gallery: The Art of this Century, New York
(1943); Documenta 2, Kassel, Germany (1956); Sao Paulo
Biennial, Sao Paulo (1965); The Surreal House, Barbican Art
Gallery, London (2010) and most recently In Wonderland: The
Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists in Mexico and the
United States, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles
(2012). Tanning´s works are included in major public
collections such as The Museum of Modern Art, New York;
Philadelphia Museum of Art; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris;
Tate, London; and Smithsonian Institute American Art Museum,
Washington D.C.
This
exhibition has been organised in collaboration with The
Dorothea Tanning Collection and Archive, New
York.
ALISON JACQUES
GALLERY
16 - 18
Berners Street
London
W1T 3LN
T: +44
(0) 20 7631 4720
|
