Tacita Dean in NYC

[Peter Ferko]

I just saw Tacita Dean's work at Marian Goodman up through April 29. Half the show is overpainted photographs. The larger ones are interesting: the ancient burial rocks silhouetted using black paint are striking; but the photo texture and paint didn't work for me (I became more interested in the brush strokes than the subject matter). On the other hand, the small paintings, using white gouache to silhouette and other marks on photos of trees, are gorgeous.

Her 16mm film Michael Hamburg, about the British poet, documents him in his home in Suffolk. The film is lush with soft images of trees and cropped compositions inside the house. While stacks of books and journals fill the house, most of the film -- and one assumes most of his life -- finds this man who escaped Nazism as a child talking about his apple orchard and the numerous unusual varieties he grows. The film, which is poignant and sweet like an apple, emerged from a commission about author W.G. Sebald who has his narrator meet Hamburg in the book The Rings of Saturn.