Foreign Policy (screenprint edition)

Location

Country: UK
City: London
Place: Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office, Whitehall

Tacita Dean’s screenprint Foreign Policy is an interpretation of a similarly titled large-scale work drawn in chalk on blackboard from 2016. 

A self-declared collector of clouds, Dean began this body of work in 2014 following her move from Berlin to Los Angeles. 

She describes a seminal encounter with a ‘voluminous atomic cloud blooming’ across Sunset Boulevard ‘on pure azure without transitional haze nor other, lesser clouds for company’. Since declaring California as ‘the place for clouds’, the artist has drawn them in chalk on blackboards and spray chalk on slates, ‘found them on postcards, painted round them, photographed and printed them.’

Foreign Policy (2016), which was drawn specifically with its destination in the Foreign Office in mind, simultaneously evokes the challenge of capturing the mutability of clouds and an epoch of unprecedented global change and uncertainty. The title shifts the subject of a cloud, whose ‘identity’ is challenging to capture, to a thought-provoking reflection on global relations. The cloud, whose symbolism gives us both dark warnings and silver linings, is universal and yet defined and shaped by its environment. 

Dean is the second artist to be awarded The Robson Orr TenTen Award by the Government Art Collection (GAC), as part of a ten-year initiative. Produced jointly by the GAC with Outset Contemporary Art Fund, the project is sponsored by leading philanthropists Sybil Robson Orr and Matthew Orr. Every year over the course of a decade, a British artist will be commissioned by the GAC to create a unique, limited edition print, which will be shown in diplomatic buildings across the world. Of these, a small number will be available for purchase to raise funds for GAC acquisitions.

Tacita Dean CBE, RA (b. 1965) is a British visual artist who works primarily in film within a multidisciplinary practice encompassing drawing, painting and photography. She was a nominee for the Turner Prize in 1998, won the Hugo Boss Prize in 2006, and was elected to the Royal Academy of Arts in 2008. The year 2018 cemented Dean’s reputation as one of the UK’s foremost artists to have emerged in the 1990s, as the National Portrait Gallery, Royal Academy and The National Gallery collaborated u2028to present LANDSCAPE, PORTRAIT, STILL LIFE, three separate exhibitions dedicated to the different genres in her oeuvre. She was artist-in-residence at the Getty Research Institute in 2014-2015, and lives and works between Los Angeles, Berlin and the UK.

Places

Subjects

weather & elements, cloud, storm, international relations, foreign policy

Materials & Techniques

paper (as artists material), print (as object name), screenprint

Artist

Tacita Dean (1965 - )

Title

Foreign Policy (screenprint edition)

Series Title

TenTen

Edition

Number 2 in an edition of 32 plus 6 artist’s proofs

Date

2019

Medium

screenprint on paper

Dimensions

height: 80 cm; width: 80 cm

Acquisition

Commissioned by the Government Art Collection for The Robson Orr TenTen Award 2019, a GAC/Outset Annual Commission

Provenance

The Artist; from whom commissioned by the Government Art Collection for The Robson Orr TenTen Award 2019, a GAC/Outset Annual Commission, October 2019

GAC number

18824/1