The epigraph to A Desk of Content material, Dorothea Tanning’s 2004 assortment of poems, reads, “It’s exhausting to be at all times the identical particular person.” The quote is attributed to Montaigne, nevertheless it may have simply as simply come from Tanning herself. When she died in 2012 on the age of 101, the artist left behind a physique of labor that included Surrealist and summary work, prints, drawings, costume designs, cloth sculptures, installations, collage, and writings. It’s not a lot that she defied straightforward categorization, however that for eight a long time, she refused to be at all times the identical artist, repeatedly pursuing new methods of expressing the unconscious.
Encyclopedia: The Late Collages of Dorothea Tanning brings collectively 19 collaged works, most of which date from the late Nineteen Eighties. Tanning had already printed the primary of her two memoirs and was more and more turning to literary pursuits. The collages, with their scraps of cloth, tissue, paper, watercolor, and ink, can provide the sense that the artist picked up previous works’ detritus from her studio flooring and determined she may as effectively make artwork out of it. Largely summary, with a couple of figurative components (the artist’s palms, cats’ paws, a faucet, a bicycle), the items serve to ignite viewers’ imaginations and encourage them to vogue their very own interpretations.
There’s a sure sensual, otherworldly high quality that pervades her work. In “Desk of Contents” (all works 1988 until famous), an oval swatch of cloth printed with cat paws and legs is glued on prime of the crinkled, translucent white tissue of a tablecloth and flanked by black paper silhouettes of a fork and knife. A grey arrow factors down on the uncanny place setting from the highest of the body, in opposition to a background of pale pink, goldenrod, and blue-gray torn paper abstractions, some resembling a reaching tentacle or department, or perhaps a human limb. Why is that this cat being served for dinner, and what creature is poised to partake of it? Maybe it’s the stuff of nightmares, or perhaps the meal is symbolic of some inside wrestle — Tanning offers us solely the wordplay of the title.
This spirit of playfulness imbues the collages’ imaginative realms. Utilizing a restrained however elegant palette of muted blue, grey, black, burgundy, peach, and pistachio (typically with hanging patches of yellow and orange), Tanning softly constructed up layers of fabric to create a delightful motion and visible lyricism, even because the amorphous kinds refuse to settle right into a narrative. In “Backyard with Gardeners,” the black and white photocopy of a hand positioned atop what seems to be rubber bands is roofed in a flurry of small, torn papers. Are the gardeners attempting to cowl one thing up with their plantings?
The present’s beautiful five-panel titular work, “Encyclopedia” (1990–95), initiates a dreamlike sequence with a black silhouette of a water faucet within the higher left nook of the primary panel. White tissue paper flows and splashes from the tap, then appears to morph into sparkles of fireside because it dances to a tumbling black bicycle and numerous human and animal figures within the following panels. The spare define of an upturned chair punctuates the highest proper of the ultimate panel. This element kinds the quilt of my paperback version of Desk of Contents, which incorporates Tanning’s poem “Collage (La Femme 100 Têtes).” In it, she writes, “Conjured situation: scissor scheme explodes./How else to drift your favourite chair/among the many waves, then sit in it?/…/A door someplace unfolds.” Tanning’s apply exhibits that there’s at all times one other door to open, a brand new world to discover, and that, when life typically feels ridden with obstacles and useless ends, artwork gives us one other doable existence.
Encyclopedia: The Late Collages of Dorothea Tanning continues at Kasmin Gallery (297 Tenth Avenue, Chelsea, Manhattan) via October 24. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.