The melancholy if playfully homophonous title of Tacita Dean’s exhibition “Sigh, Sigh, Sigh,” coinciding with the ten-year anniversary of Cy Twombly’s passing (in this very city), conveys a sense of loss and letting go. Staged at the foundation named after his former secretary and now his archivist—a discreet presence alongside Twombly’s in Dean’s film portrait Edwin Parker, 2011, on view here—the show is a quiet tribute paid to Twombly by a fellow artist obsessed with myth and classical antiquity. Mounted on the wall above the steps leading down to the main gallery space in a way that evokes the injunction to “know thyself” inscribed on the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, three works on paper titled Tacita, Tacita, Tacita, 2021, spell out Dean’s own name—in white gesso on a black chalkboard ground—forged by the artist to resemble Twombly’s swooping hand.
Unlike the film portrait, which is dominated by the artist’s towering figure as captured in the intimacy of his studio in his hometown of Lexington, Virginia, the installation GAETA (fifty photographs plus one), 2015, named after the coastal city between Rome and Naples where Twombly lived and worked in later life, merely hints at his presence. In that body of work, Dean directs our gaze toward sundry tell-tale objects (a pair of black leather shoes, notes to self, white stones used as paper weights) handled by or belonging to the artist and brought into sharp focus in a sequence of alternately black-and-white and color photographs in a (mostly) restricted palette of yellow, brown, tan, and blue that reflects the muted hues characteristic not only of Twombly’s oeuvre but also that of Giorgio Morandi. Shot in the latter’s studio in Bologna, the 16-mm film Still Life, 2009, highlights the cryptographic qualities of both artists’ work. It is intended as an epilogue of sorts to a fragmented body of work, full of hidden traces, resonances, and echoes.
