Tacita Dean

Black, Green, Green and White

★☆☆☆☆

On until 22 November 2025

Phoning it in makes little sense in the age of the WhatsApp message, and film studies lost to video a long time ago. Dean was once good at this transition. This two-segment exhibition – consisting of inconsequential light paintings and film sprocket drawings in the gallery’s main space and a torturous 16mm film portrait of another film master in the basement – makes no effort on behalf of its subjects, let alone the medium.

Dean’s slate drawings and Polaroid doodles relate to Shakespeare, but one wouldn’t know it. One wouldn’t need to because such imagery is perfectly serviceable student dorm decoration. In the gallery, however, it is so quotidian that it barely distinguishes itself from the degree show.

Worse, though, is the forty-minute-long film portrait of the Ukrainian photographer Boris Mikhailov and his wife Vita. The subjects, whom Dean stages in the shadow of Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate, inspire interest inherently. This could have been a tender portrait of an ageing couple’s stillness, or any number of things, really. But Dean gives the Mikhailovs both too little and too much to do in her frame. The result captivates before revealing itself to be dead boring.


notes and notices are short and curt exhibition reviews. Read more:

Michael Simpson at Modern Art ★★★★☆

Michael Simpson

★★★★☆

In this meditation of surface disguised as a study of objects, neither is a truer likeness of the events.

Theodore Ereira-Guyer, Jandyra Waters: We Lost Lots of Beautiful Things at Elizabeth Xi Bauer

Theodore Ereira-Guyer, Jandyra Waters

We Lost Lots of Beautiful Things

★★★★☆

The human mind is mimetic – all art is representation.

Dickon Drury at Seventeen ★★★☆☆

Dickon Drury

The Preceding Cart & POV: You are Beans

★★★☆☆

Painting needs prophets, Drury plays a jester.

James White: Every Corner Abandoned Too Soon at Anthony Wilkinson ★★★★☆

James White

Every Corner Abandoned Too Soon

★★★★☆

Paint that does this to a pile of plastic coat hangers contends with any reality.

Aleksandar Denić, The Serbian pavilion in Venice ★★★☆☆

Aleksandar Denić

Exposition Coloniale

★★★☆☆

Denić took the Biennale’s theme literally, as though he was not in on the art world joke.

Entangled Pasts at The Royal Academy ★★☆☆☆

Entangled Pasts, 1768–now

★★☆☆☆

Who could have thought that these mantras would turn into rote?

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