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Tacita Dean — California - true and false
Tacita Dean — California - true and false
Tacita Dean

California - true and false

2026

Two found postcards, joined and painted over in gouache, form the material and conceptual ground for this intimate work by Tacita Dean. The postcards, already bearing the weight of California's image culture, become sites of quiet transformation as Dean's painted additions blur the boundary between document and invention, between the state as it presents itself and the state as it is imagined. The title's insistence on the "true and false" speaks directly to Dean's longstanding preoccupation with the instability of photographic and mass-produced images, their tendency to circulate as fact while functioning as mythology. Dean's use of found ephemera places this work within a practice deeply attentive to time, obsolescence, and the patina of the overlooked. Postcards carry a particular cultural charge, having once served as a primary vehicle for transmitting landscape, place, and aspiration across distances. By working on two of them rather than one, Dean introduces a doubling that complicates any singular reading, allowing the composition to breathe across its seam while refusing easy resolution. The gouache, a medium she has returned to with increasing frequency in her works on paper, softens photographic certainty with the handmade and the contingent. Available through Marian Goodman Gallery Los Angeles, this work rewards close looking and suits a collector drawn to the conceptual rigor of Dean's broader project while seeking something physically modest in scale but rich in implication. It stands as a characteristic example of her ability to find density of meaning in the simplest of vehicles, turning the disposable and the everyday into an occasion for sustained reflection on how we picture, and misrepresent, the world around us.

Medium
Gouache on 2 found postcards
Dimensions

Notes

From MGG LA — Trial of the Finger. SKU: 31330.

For Sale — $35000

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About this work

Tacita Dean, California - true and false, 2026

Two found postcards, joined and painted over in gouache, form the material and conceptual ground for this intimate work by Tacita Dean. The postcards, already bearing the weight of California's image culture, become sites of quiet transformation as Dean's painted additions blur the boundary between document and invention, between the state as it presents itself and the state as it is imagined. The title's insistence on the "true and false" speaks directly to Dean's longstanding preoccupation with the instability of photographic and mass-produced images, their tendency to circulate as fact while functioning as mythology. Dean's use of found ephemera places this work within a practice deeply attentive to time, obsolescence, and the patina of the overlooked. Postcards carry a particular cultural charge, having once served as a primary vehicle for transmitting landscape, place, and aspiration across distances. By working on two of them rather than one, Dean introduces a doubling that complicates any singular reading, allowing the composition to breathe across its seam while refusing easy resolution. The gouache, a medium she has returned to with increasing frequency in her works on paper, softens photographic certainty with the handmade and the contingent. Available through Marian Goodman Gallery Los Angeles, this work rewards close looking and suits a collector drawn to the conceptual rigor of Dean's broader project while seeking something physically modest in scale but rich in implication. It stands as a characteristic example of her ability to find density of meaning in the simplest of vehicles, turning the disposable and the everyday into an occasion for sustained reflection on how we picture, and misrepresent, the world around us.

Medium
Gouache on 2 found postcards
Dimensions
postcard: 8.9 x 14 cm
Year
2026
Seen at
Marian Goodman Gallery Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA

Related themes

Document and Invention, Living Artist, Photography, Blue Chip, Contemplative, Conceptual, Muted, Mixed Media, Place, Collage, Diptych, Works on Paper, Portrait, British, Female Artist, Memory, Gouache, Black and White, Found Objects, Contemporary

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