Tacita Dean, Landscape, Royal Academy of Arts

A collaboration between three of the UK’s major museums is an extraordinary thing: Tacita Dean, the internationally renowned contemporary artist, is at the centre of these thee landmark exhibitions taking place across central London this summer.

The National Gallery, The National Portrait Gallery and the Royal Academy of Arts are hosting exhibitions of Dean's work that all reflect a different facet of her oeuvre: Still Life, Portraits and Landscape respectively. Across these exhibitions Dean uses her work, primarily in film, to question the traditions historically associated with these disciplines.

The last of the trio of exhibitions, Tacita Dean: Landscape, inaugurates the Gabrielle Jungels-Winkler Galleries at the New RA. It's a monumental ode to landscape painting, a genre once championed by early Royal Academicians including Thomas Gainsborough, John Constable and J.M.W. Turner.

Opening this intimate but glorious exhibition is a mixture of early and new work that focuses on Dean's relationship to the world around her, and explores, above all, her fascination with global landscapes. Her monumental blackboard drawings, and her new series of slate cloud drawings, that open the exhibition, cast a fresh light on the medium. From erupting volcanoes to a vivid photogravure of the ancient mountain Quarantania, it's clear that atmosphere, condition and light are as important to Dean as the subject itself.

Closing the exhibition is Antigone, Dean’s most ambitions quasi-narrative 35mm film diptych to date. From the moorlands of Cornwall to the post-industrial Mississippi flood plains, Dean combines vastly different landscapes within a single cinematographic image. The film, which takes the eponymous heroine of Sophocle's Antigone — also the name of Dean's sister — as its heroine, tackles the idea of blindness, and is, Dean claims a 'mediation on Antigone and Oedipus' flight into the wilderness'. With a running time of 56 minutes, Antigone is a masterpiece that merits patience and time.

The lofty, luminous space of the RA's new galleries provide a serene backdrop to Dean's landscapes that incorporate elements of botany, cosmography, geology, natural phenomena and travel.

Click here for more information on the trio of exhibitions which exemplify Dean's versatility and extraordinary talent.