Tacita Dean

Gemini G.E.L. at Joni Moisant Weyl is pleased to present Tacita Dean: Eclipse Drawings, 2026 featuring twelve new multi-layered screenprints published by the renowned Los Angeles-based artists’ workshop, Gemini G.E.L.

In April 2024, Tacita Dean traveled to Eagle Pass, Texas, with a singular intention: to watch a total solar eclipse. Having filmed several total eclipses over the years, she wanted to experience one without being behind the lens. Yet when the eclipse arrived, instinct took over. She reached for her camera—and not looking through the viewfinder, she twisted and turned it toward the sun, spinning and snapping with little aim or calculation. When the negatives were processed, something extraordinary emerged: not photographs in any conventional sense, but drawings made with sunlight itself, loops and arcs of luminous energy seared onto the blackness of the sky.

The resulting images are not completely photographic, and Dean considers these images to be drawings, stating “These were just miraculous. I thought, my God, this is drawing with the sun – you can see the bite of the moon.” These gestural ‘drawings’ were then translated into twelve screenprints of exceptional technical prowess by Master Printer Jeff McMane, some using as many as eighteen colors. Dean deliberately selected the screenprinting medium instead of a traditional photo-printing approach in order to convey the depth of the radiant dark sky and eerie colors of the eclipse. Usually, the whites of the imagery are left as bare paper, with the darker tones built up from layered colors. The Eclipse Drawings reverse this traditional approach, starting instead with a flat black background and adding layers of whites, browns, and green inks in various degrees of opacity.

When seen as a whole, the series captures the ephemeral nature of the eclipse, matched by the urgency of the spontaneous and quick traces of the artist’s movements. By presenting the elusive passage of the eclipse through these drawings, Dean exposes a natural phenomenon that we can never see or look at directly. Our experience of an eclipse must always be mediated through another device, be it specialized glasses or photography equipment, or in this case, screenprints.

Tacita Dean was born in Canterbury, England in 1965. She studied in painting departments both at Falmouth School of Art in Cornwall and for postgraduate at the Slade School of Fine Art in London. Despite being best known for her 16mm films, Dean has always made drawings, which are very central to her practice. She also uses a variety of other mediums, including photography, sound, found objects and printmaking as well as writing often about her own and other artists’ work. Highly regarded, Dean has been the recipient of numerous awards including The Queen Sonja Print Award in 2026; becoming a 2025 National Academician by the National Academy of Design; receiving an Honorary Doctorate from the University of the Arts Helsinki in 2024; the Cherry Kearton Medal and Award, Royal Geographical Society, United Kingdom in 2019; the Kurt Schwitters Prize in 2009, the Hugo Boss Prize at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 2006, and the Sixth Benesse Prize at the 51st Venice Biennale in 2005. Dean’s solo museum exhibitions include The Columbus Museum of Art in 2025; the Menil Collection, Houston in 2024; MCA Sydney in 2023; the Bourse de Commerce, Pinault Collection, Paris in 2023; MUDAM, Luxembourg, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles in 2022; Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in 2022; Kunstmuseum Basel in 2021; EMMA - Espoo Museum of Modern Art, Espoo in 2020; NY Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen and at the Serralves Museum, Porto in 2019; and at the Kunsthaus Bregenz, The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, as well as The Royal Academy of Arts, London, in 2018 as part of a trilogy of exhibitions held in conjunction with the city’s National Gallery and National Portrait Gallery.