TACITA DEAN, BRUCE NAUMAN

Dean and Nauman met in February 2025, and their first conversation centered on drawing. Nauman was then working on a new series of drawings using gold- and silverpoint, which marked his return to drawing after a break of nearly twenty years. He was also beginning to film himself drawing using a 3D iPhone rig of his own invention, often drawing blind with his mind’s eye and his memory to depict the still life in front of him. Both a mnemonic aid and an exercise in concentration, each drawing bears witness to the infallible link between the mind and the gesture, the image and its representation. As Nauman told Dean, “You can’t go wrong when you are drawing with your eyes closed.” Dean had also recently begun using silverpoint on blackboard surfaces, and Nauman’s blind drawing echoed her own interest in the importance of the unintended act in art and the blindness that her masking inside a 35mm camera invites.

As the dialogue between Dean and Nauman continued remotely over several months, they agreed to meet again and organize a collaborative drawing session, which Dean would film on 35mm. Taking inspiration from the experimental use of masking and extended frames in Abel Gance’s Napoleon, Dean adapted her masking system to enable the artists to appear to draw simultaneously while side by side in the frame. Together, they assembled the still life they would draw using a plaster cast of Goethe’s hand, which Dean had brought from Berlin, and one of Nauman’s cast bronze hand works where the thumb and fingers form a heart.

At Nauman’s home in New Mexico in November 2025, and then again in January 2026, the artists experimented with a multitude of possibilities without any preconceived idea of the film’s final form. Nauman had made a collage of torn photocopies to imagine how it might be possible for their hands to share the frame, which Dean then traced to create a mask. She also made masks from the outlines of her own and Nauman’s hands. From these meetings, experiments and exchanges, two 35mm film projects have emerged so far: Hand On, opening in early October at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin, and Drawing Blind Drawing, presented for the first time in Paris.

Drawing Blind Drawing, on view on the ground floor of the gallery, focuses solely on Nauman and Dean’s hands as they draw. The film diptych uses two ‘torn’ masks derived from Nauman’s collage, which is also on show in the exhibition. Each film shows different paper grounds; one made with blackboard paint and the other with traditional white silverpoint acrylic. One artist is blind and is assisted by the other who can see. Who leads and who is led changes in the other half of the frame, and in one drawing, they use only one hand while in the other, they use both hands.

The silent double 35mm projection is over seven meters long and consists of a further double fragmentation, with each of the films itself divided diagonally. The artists’ hands appear in different scales, intertwining and merging. The diptych arrangement creates a mirror-like effect and symbolically marks the work’s dual authorship. For around four minutes, a choreography of gestures reveals the artists’ focus and dedication to their work as the gold- and silverpoint drawings slowly emerge. The illusion of the present and continuous moment lies in the interweaving and simultaneity of the four sequences, whose interactions create a form of musical rhythm and poetic unpredictability.

Drawing Blind Drawing also encapsulates the rapport and complicity between Dean and Nauman that developed over the course of several months. Both place great importance on the process and its uncertainties; they were guided by their intuitions. The film’s production method, unburdened by any quest for formal perfection, mirrored the liberating and unpredictable nature of Nauman’s studio-inspired work. By appearing in front of the camera, Dean and Nauman each reveal a degree of vulnerability. Whilst Nauman has often reflected on his role as an artist, taking his own body as his subject, Dean has always tried to remain behind the camera, observing other artists in her filmed portraits rather than being observed herself.

The exhibition is accompanied by a booklet that includes the long version of a conversation between Tacita Dean and art historian Hal Foster around the two recent collaborative films by Dean and Nauman. A shorter version appears in the catalogue for Next Door, Hamburger Bahnhof, 2026.

During the exhibition, from 20 October to 14 November, screenings of a selection of Tacita Dean’s 16mm films will be held daily at 4pm downstairs in the basement at the gallery. The detailed screening schedule will be posted on our website.

In conjunction with the gallery exhibition, Tacita Dean and Bruce Nauman will present another collaboration: Hand On as part of the exhibition Next Door at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin, beginning on 9 October. The work is placed in relation to Room with My Soul Left Out, Room That Does Not Care (1984/2010), Nauman’s permanent installation located at the far end of the museum’s Rieckhallen where Tacita used to have her studio in the early 2000s.

Nauman and Dean each opened solo exhibitions in September 2026: Tacita Dean: FILM at the Marciano Art Foundation in Los Angeles, from September 18, 2026, to February 27, 2027, and Bruce Nauman: Identical at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, from September 19, 2026, to March 21, 2027.

Tacita Dean was born in 1965 in Canterbury, UK and lives and works in Berlin and Los Angeles. She has been the recipient of numerous prizes including the Queen Sonja Print Award in 2026, the Kurt Schwitters Prize in 2009, the Hugo Boss Prize at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 2006 and the Sixth Benesse Prize at the 51st Venice Biennale in 2005.

Recent solo exhibitions have been held at The Columbus Museum of Art, Colombus, OH (2025); the Menil Collection, Houston, TX and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (2024); the Bourse de Commerce - Pinault Collection, Paris (2023); Mudam, Luxembourg, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles (2022); Kunstmuseum Basel (2021); EMMA - Espoo Museum of Modern Art, Espoo (2020). A trilogy of exhibitions entitled respectively LANDSCAPE, PORTRAIT and STILL LIFE was held simultaneously at The Royal Academy of Arts, National Portrait Gallery and The National Gallery in London in 2018.

Bruce Nauman is a U.S. artist born in 1941 in Fort Wayne, Indiana. He lives and works in New Mexico, USA. Nauman was awarded prestigious prizes, including the Wolf Foundation Prize Arts (1993), the Golden Lion for lifetime Achievement at the Venise Biennale (1999), the Praemium Imperiale (2004) and the Austrian Frederick Kiesler Prize (2014). He represented the Unites States at the Venice Biennale in 2009, where the pavilion was awarded the Golden Lion.

Nauman has been the focus of over 250 solo exhibitions, most recently at Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong (2024); SITE Santa Fe, NM (2023); and Palazzo Grassi – Punta della Dogana, Venice (2021-22). Recent retrospectives include those at Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan (2022-23) and M Woods, Beijing (2022). An eponymous survey at Tate (2020) traveled to the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2021), while Bruce Nauman: Disappearing Acts, a comprehensive retrospective, made its debut at Schaulager, Basel (2018) and then traveled to The Museum of Modern Art, New York and MoMA P.S.1 (2018/19).

Courtesy Galerie Marian Goodman.