LA Magic Hour compliments Tacita Dean’s previous lithographic project with Gemini G.E.L., LA Exuberance (2016) (also on view), which depicted white clouds contrasted with the bright cerulean blues of a typical Los Angeles sky. This time, the artist has focused on the sunsets of Los Angeles, for which the city is famous. Dean began by working from the many spray chalk drawings she created for LA Exuberance, narrowing the selection down to fifteen. The images were then inverted and rotated to find the desired compositions. Dean took many photographs of colorful west coast sunsets, which were then matched by master printer Jill Lerner through a complex technique of layering transparent and semi-opaque colors. The fifteen lithographs appear effortlessly luminous, capturing the atmospheric space through a balance of blended and contrasting swaths of vivid colors. When seen as a whole, the series captures the variety of tones and colors as the sun goes down, taking us through the pale oranges and yellow tinged blues that begin a sunset, all the way to the electric magenta of its last breath.
These cloudscapes depict the eternal mutability of the sky and the earth’s motion, separated from any specific horizon line. Dean has been fascinated by natural phenomena throughout her career, and images of trees, oceans, clouds, and landscapes are pervasive. Dean’s instinctive ability to focus on an everyday natural phenomenon, such as a sunset, retains the wonder of recognizing the elusive complexity of a cloud in its ephemeral state. Each lithograph in LA Magic Hour represents a singular, unique moment in time and in the imagination of the artist, a beautiful synthesis of her fascination and studies in the colors and formations of clouds.
