From 21 February to 25 April 2026, Marian Goodman Gallery in Los Angeles presents
Trial of the Finger, an exhibition that reaffirms Tacita Dean’s unwavering commitment to the physical realities of image-making. Working across 16mm and 35mm film, slate, glass, and Polaroid, Dean continues to defend the tactile and the handmade in an age increasingly dominated by the virtual. The exhibition’s title borrows from Dr. Samuel Johnson’s critique of the Metaphysical poets, invoking the “trial of the finger” as a measure of counting and touch. For Dean, the phrase becomes a meditation on how the body—through fingers, thumbs, and even the span of a hand—remains our oldest instrument of reckoning and description.
In the Seward Gallery, newly completed slate drawings and the blackboard tondo
In Montem (he fell) (2026) emerge from surfaces that dictate their own terms. Found school slates, some oxidized to a fragile green bloom, required a recalibration of touch. Their imagery traces back to an eclipse witnessed in Eagle Pass, Texas, where Dean’s refusal to document paradoxically resulted in luminous solar loops—photographic drawings made by instinct rather than intention. These gestures extend into works on glass fashioned from 19th-century locomotive windows, inherited from her father and painted in enamel through a meticulous reverse process developed with German artisans.
The Hudson Gallery debuts
Sidney Felsen decorates an Envelope (2026), a 16mm portrait of the late co-founder of Gemini G.E.L.. Felsen, who collaborated with figures from Robert Rauschenberg to Julie Mehretu, is observed performing a modest ritual: embellishing an envelope with stamps and care. In the Main Gallery, the 35mm installations
Paradise (2021) and
Geography Biography (2023) unfold as lyrical testaments to photochemical film. The former, born from
The Dante Project at Royal Opera House with music by Thomas Adès, bathes Dante’s cosmos in anamorphic color. The latter, an “accidental self-portrait,” layers gauges and postcards into a fragile archive of memory. Across the exhibition, Dean upholds film not as nostalgia, but as inheritance—something to be practiced, protected, and passed on.
Image:
Tacita Dean, oh god, 2025 (Detail). 3 Polaroids. 4 1/5 x 3 1/2 in. (10.7 x 8.8 cm) (each). Courtesy the artist. © Tacita Dean. Photo: Studio Tacita Dean/Simon Hanzer