
Paradise
2021
Paradise (2021) unfolds as a 35mm color anamorphic film accompanied by Thomas Adès's original score "Paradiso," creating an immersive 24-and-a-half-minute meditation that moves between the terrestrial and the transcendent. Dean filmed in the Canary Islands, capturing volcanic landscapes, ancient forests, and oceanic horizons through the wide, enveloping format that anamorphic photography uniquely enables. The result is a work that operates simultaneously as cinema, as landscape painting, and as philosophical inquiry, with Adès's music neither illustrating the imagery nor competing with it, but existing in a kind of sovereign parallel that deepens the emotional register of the whole. Dean's longstanding commitment to analog film as both medium and subject is fully present here, the grain and warmth of 35mm carrying an almost tactile weight that digital processes cannot replicate. This is the third of four editions plus one artist's proof, situating the collector within an extremely limited field of ownership for a work of significant institutional ambition. Dean's films have entered the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Tate, and the Centre Pompidou, and her collaborations with composers of Adès's stature reflect the serious intellectual world in which her practice operates. Presented by Marian Goodman Gallery Los Angeles, Paradise represents the kind of acquisition that bridges the collection of moving image work with the longer tradition of object-based collecting, as the film's physical materiality, its celluloid existence, is central to its meaning and its value. For collectors attentive to works that carry genuine formal rigor alongside lyrical beauty, this piece stands as an exceptional example of Dean's mature vision.
- Medium
- With music, "Paradiso" by Thomas Adès 35mm color anamorphic film, optical sound; 24 1/2 minutes Edition of 4 plus 1 artist's proof (#3/4)
Notes
From MGG LA — Trial of the Finger. SKU: 22457.
More by Tacita Dean
Artists in conversation
James Benning
American · b. 1942
Benning creates long duration landscape films that use sustained attention to natural environments as a meditative and almost painterly practice, mirroring Dean's slow cinematic gaze at volcanic and oceanic terrain in Paradise.

Sharon Lockhart
American · b. 1964

Lockhart works at the intersection of film and photography to create durational, contemplative moving image works where landscape and time become the primary subject matter, closely paralleling Dean's use of 35mm film as a vehicle for transcendent environmental observation.

Bill Viola
American · b. 1951

Viola creates immersive audiovisual works that move between elemental natural forces and spiritual transcendence, frequently pairing cinematic imagery of water, fire, and landscape with original music scores in ways that echo Dean's integration of Thomas Adès's Paradiso with volcanic and oceanic imagery.


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