Kasmin is thrilled to present its second solo exhibition of work by Dorothea Tanning (1910-2012), concentrating on her late-career collages from the 1980s and 1990s. Celebrating the multidisciplinary spirit of her work, Encyclopedia: The Late Collages of Dorothea Tanning delves into the artist’s universe where literary devices, from humor and irony to paradox and repetition, combine with her personal visual lexicon to inspire, as she once wrote, “Art as metaphor for language.”
The works on view were realized by Tanning in New York in the 1980s and 1990s, during a period when her creative energies were shifting from painting and sculpture to works on paper and more broadly from studio art to writing poetry, fiction, and her memoirs. She had experimented with collage throughout her career and returned to the medium with renewed focus after moving back to the United States in 1980, having lived in France for some 25 years. These collages see Tanning employ techniques developed over six decades—painting, drawing, and cutting and composing paper, including fragments of her own watercolors. She also incorporated pieces of fabric, thereby invoking her soft sculptures of the late 1960s to early 1970s. Juxtaposing organic and suggestive shapes with more familiar imagery such as bicycles, tableware, animals, tumbling nudes, and her own hand, Tanning expands upon themes and the play between figuration and abstraction found in her earlier paintings and sculpture. Pairing her imagery with unexpected and evocative titles, she explores the poetic dimension of her visual art practice.