New Commissions: Tacita Dean and Veronica Ryan

For Barbara Hepworth: Art & Life, leading British artists Tacita Dean and Veronica Ryan have been commissioned to create new installations. These interventions highlight Hepworth's work as an enduring source of inspiration and celebrate her artistic legacy.  

Time, history and place are universal themes that lie at the heart of Tacita Dean’s work. Dean is best known for her use of analogue film, and her advocacy for its preservation as an artistic medium, but she has a wide-ranging practice that includes drawings, photographs, installations and collections of found objects and images.

Dean studied at the Falmouth School of Art on the south coast of England and was introduced to the work of Barbara Hepworth and the St Ives School of artists early on in her career. She found a particular affinity with Hepworth’s interest in Cornish landscapes, the natural rock formations, the coastal paths and the ancient standing stone sites. 

For her new commission Significant Form, Dean has selected 130 images from her personal archive of over 30,000 historical postcards collected at flea markets over many decades. The images have been re-photographed and photochemically hand-printed at various scales and on a variety of papers.

Inspired by her shared interests with Hepworth, Dean selected images that embodied an idea of ‘form’ in its broadest sense, creating an intuitive journey through objects and formations found in the natural world, to others made by artists across time. 

Presented without attribution or explanation, Dean’s free-flowing constellation of images encourages us, the viewer, to follow our own readings and associations, and find our own significance in forms encountered in the world around us.