SFMOMA 1: Disassembling Beauty

A couple of weeks ago, there were three of us and only two passes to see The Steins Collect show at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.



So I sat the exhibit out and wandered around, starting off at the blaringly sunny roof garden where you could look at Calder sculptures and human legs.



Next door in the fifth floor galleries, in a show called "The More Things Change," the exhibit was living up to its name...



...as workers disassembled "Beauty," the large 2006 photograph/painting by the British artist Tacita Dean.



According to a recent silly list in Newsweek magazine, the 45-year-old Dean is one of "The 10 Most Important Artists of Today."



Though she lives in Berlin, "Beauty" is part of a series of photographs she took of trees from the English countryside in Kent where she was raised.



According to the wall signage: "After blowing up the image to an extraordinary scale, she applied a chalky white gouache to the surface of the photograph, streaking thick impasto across the pictures and leaving only the figure of the central tree untouched."



I hope "Beauty" is reassembled in the permanent galleries soon. It's one of my favorite new pieces in the whole museum.