Artist Tacita Dean has created the latest commission for the UK Government Art Collection (GAC), producing a series of screenprints depicting a Californian cloudscape. The new works are based on a huge piece drawn in chalk which hangs in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (Foreign Policy, 2016).
Dean’s new screenprints (Foreign Policy, 2019) are part of the Robson Orr Ten Ten Award initiative, a ten-year scheme whereby a UK artist is commissioned to create a limited edition print to be shown in diplomatic buildings worldwide. The project—funded by the film and stage producer Sybil Robson Orr and her husband, Matthew—launched last year with the inaugural award given to the artist Hurvin Anderson (one of his prints hangs in No. 10 Downing Street).
Tacita Dean with Foreign Policy (2016) at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office Photo: Gareth Harris
Dean’s cloudscape piece is available as a screenprint, available in an edition of 32 (with six artist’s proofs). Fifteen editions will be acquired by the GAC and distributed to embassies, consulates-generals and other government residences globally. Eleven works will be available to purchase through the arts organisation Outset, priced at £8,500 each.
“They sell the works on our behalf; the money raised increases acquisitions [funding] and support British art,” says Penny Johnson, director of the GAC. The remainder will be available through Dean’s dealers including Frith Street Gallery in London. The Government Art Collection (GAC), established in 1898, is a national collection of historic and contemporary art displayed in government buildings in the UK and abroad.
The original Foreign Policy (2016) chalk work was installed in the office of Sir Simon McDonald after he became permanent under-secretary at the Foreign Office in 2015. “We had to rearrange the furniture to protect the piece,” he said. “Tacita brought her chalks with her today.” A copy of 1984 by George Orwell sits on McDonald’s desk.
A project statement says that Dean’s original 2016 work was drawn specifically with the Foreign Office in mind, and “simultaneously evokes the challenge of capturing the mutability of clouds and an epoch of unprecedented global change and uncertainty”.
In a briefing held today at the Foreign Office, Dean alluded to Brexit and the UK’s impending departure from the European Union, saying that she had made the original work "far too gentle. It should be way, way angrier. As a UK European abroad, and as an artist in Berlin, Britons [living] on the outside were more scared than those on the inside. Now, we’re living through the repercussions of that new world unfortunately.”
Dean is currently creating the sets and costumes for The Dante Project, the second part of which will be shown at the Royal Opera House in London next May. The piece, a collaboration with the choreographer Wayne MacGregor, interprets the Purgatory and Paradise sections of Dante’s classic depiction of the afterlife. The Inferno part premiered at the Music Centre in Los Angeles earlier this year.
UPDATE (28 September): This report was modified to reflect that Foreign Policy (2016) was previously installed in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.