LA Exuberance 14

"How many blues make up a sky? Tacita Dean found blues within blues while searching for the celestial in her series of fifteen lithographs published by Gemini G.E.L. Titled LA Exuberance, the series emerged following her move to Los Angeles, after decades of living in Berlin or London, to be artist in residence at the Getty Research Institute in 2014.

Like many English émigrés before her, she felt uplifted by the broad, untroubled sky. She wasn’t expecting to see clouds, but realized that each whitish wisp only intensified the startling quality of blue that surrounded it. Of course, skies are blue anywhere that air molecules disturb the shorter rays of sun, but L.A. is legendary for not only the quality of its light but also for the consistency of its availability.

Dean explained, 'What surprised me most about Los Angeles was the one thing I had imagined there would be little of, and that was clouds. These clouds differed from their European counterparts because they were nearly never gray but extremely variable and white; they appeared unconnected to rain, as in Europe, but instead to the imperceptible activity of winds high above the earth’s surface.'”

-Excerpted from an essay by Hunter Drohojowska-Philp for Tacita Dean's catalog at Gemini G.E.L.