LONDON.- Leading British European artist Tacita Dean has been awarded the Robson Orr TenTen Award 2019 by the Government Art Collection. The new work was unveiled at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office on Friday 27 September 2019 by Sir Simon McDonald, Permanent Under-Secretary for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs and Head of HM Diplomatic Service, and Penny Johnson, Director of the GAC.

The Robson Orr TenTen Award is presented jointly by the Government Art Collection with Outset Contemporary Art Fund and is sponsored by leading philanthropists Sybil Robson Orr and Matthew Orr. Every year a British artist is commissioned to create a unique, limited edition print to be shown in diplomatic buildings across the world. A small number are available for purchase through a collaboration with the pioneering philanthropic arts organisation Outset to raise funds for the GAC acquisition fund. The 10-year scheme was launched last year with the inaugural award given to the artist Hurvin Anderson.

Tacita Dean’s specially commissioned print, Foreign Policy (screenprint edition) 2019, is an interpretation of a similarly titled large-scale work drawn in chalk on blackboard from 2016, currently on loan by the artist to Sir Simon McDonald at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. The original work, Foreign Policy 2016, was drawn specifically with its destination in the Foreign Office in mind and simultaneously evokes the challenge of capturing the mutability of clouds and an epoch of unprecedented global change and uncertainty.

Dean’s cloud collection began in 2014 following her move from Berlin to Los Angeles, where she describes a seminal encounter with a ‘voluminous atomic cloud blooming’ across Sunset Boulevard ‘on pure azure without transitional haze nor other, lesser clouds for company’. Since declaring California as ‘the place for clouds’, the artist has drawn them in chalk on blackboards and spray chalk on slates, ‘found them on postcards, painted round them, photographed and printed them’.

Known foremost for her work in film and commitment to preserving this medium for the future, Tacita Dean’s multidisciplinary practice encompasses drawing, painting and photography. The year 2018 cemented Dean’s reputation as one of the UK’s foremost artists to have emerged in the 1990s, as the National Portrait Gallery, Royal Academy and The National Gallery collaborated to present Landscape, Portrait, Still Life, three separate exhibitions dedicated to the different genres in her work. Dean was a nominee for the Turner Prize in 1998, won the Hugo Boss Prize in 2006, and was elected to the Royal Academy of Arts in 2008. She was artist in residence at the Getty Research Institute 2014-15 and lives and works between Los Angeles and Berlin.