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The Menil Collection has just opened the first major museum survey for Dean (b. 1965), who is widely celebrated in Europe and the U.K. "Blind Folly" offers Americans a chance to get to know her oeuvre, which tends to produce works that feel equal parts overwhelming and ephemeral. The show has new works inspired by the artist's recent time in Houston (which included a residency at the Menil's Cy Twombly Gallery), her monumental blackboard drawings, found postcards, albumen prints and, of course, a rotating group of her 16mm films.
In a publication for the show, Dean likens her inspiration to the "unearthly subterranean vapors summoned to human intelligibility by the priestess Pythia, the Oracle at the Temple of Apollo at Delphi." Those new to her work will probably sense these vapors most powerfully in her blackboards because it's hard to believe these are real, the black slabs offering far more detail than your phones.
She returned to this medium at Documenta 13 after a ten-year hiatus, tracing the course of the Kabul River in Afghanistan. In Houston, she offers , completed between 2017 and 2022. refers to Caspar David Friedrich 's (1823–24) and, made during the COVID-19 pandemic, manages to outdo him in terms of melodrama. Her chalked icebergs manage to capture texture and ferocity better than paint, CGI or even reality ever could. It's like being on the deck of the Titanic, which was how the lockdowns felt: you saw something giant coming at you, and even if it was somewhat horrible, you had to admire its grandiosity.
The new works in the show emerge from these blackboards. They are drawn on found pieces of worn green slate, and in some places, we see her using a finger to draw in the dust. These conjure Twombly with their arcane loops, as well as the most recent solar eclipse—eclipses being another classic subject for her. I feel there's something in them, too, of the unique kinds of trees one finds in Texas, the kind that scratch the sky as if trying to communicate something. The show offers plenty of her other work with trees, dating back to 2006, usually captured via photographic prints that she augments with hand-drawn marks. All these bodies feel like Dean working hard to blend humanity with a broader view of nature, reminding us that all that we cannot see or comprehend—including our deaths—is no less valuable than that which we can.
