Tacita Dean studied art at the Falmouth School of Art in England, the Supreme School of Fine Art in Athens, and the Slade School of Fine Art in London. In 1998 she was nominated for a Turner Prize and was awarded a DAAD scholarship for Berlin, Germany, in 2000. She has received the following prizes: Aachen Art Prize (2002); Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, Italy (2004); the Sixth Benesse Prize at the 51st Venice Biennale (2005) the Hugo Boss Prize at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2006) and the Kurt Schwitters Prize (2009). Dean has also participated in the Venice Biennale in 2003 and 2005 and Documenta 13 (2012). Her work has been shown internationally at such institutions as the Schaulager, Basel (2006), New Museum, New York (2008), Tate Modern, London (2011), the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Spain (2010), and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC (2001).
Tacita Dean’s most recent show at Marian Goodman Gallery in New York, … my English breath in foreign clouds , featured new drawings, photos, and films. It was presented in three rooms all cleverly linked throughout the exhibition. Upon entering visitors were welcomed to the main gallery with lithographs, and drawings on...
Tacita Dean’s commission for the 19th Biennale of Sydney and Carriageworks, Event for a Stage , sits at the apex of a Biennale whose greatest successes have been in its film, video and performance works. Dean is an artist who courts chance and she described this, her first live work, as being based on a “series of profound...
South Korea’s most anticipated event of the year, the opening of MMCA Seoul, is a milestone for the national museum and local art scene. The new outpost of South Korea’s singular, national contemporary art museum is situated on a minefield of historic structures, set within a zoning law nightmare, and sandwiched between...
" Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will ." George Bernard Shaw In 1879, a French postman named Ferdinand Cheval began building an esoteric homage to the beauty of sandstone. On one of his postal rounds, Cheval came across small pieces of...
Clouds and stones and clods of light. Mountains in Austria and an ant on a rock in Mexico. Best of all, a long, slow eclipse. The final exhibition in Tacita Dean’s three-part meditation on the portrait (at the National Portrait Gallery), the still life (at the National Gallery) and now Landscape (in three rooms of the new galleries at the Royal...
Film–proper, old-fashioned analogue film, screened using one of those hulking projectors that generate nearly as much heat and sound as light–is Tacita Dean’s medium and, in many ways, her subject. Her current exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery (NPG) in London, the institution claims, holds the distinction of being its first ever show ‘to...
Now, the full scope and richness of Dean’s work is to be revealed in three exhibitions, which mark a unique collaboration between three London museums. In its first exhibition devoted to the moving image, the National Portrait Gallery is showing her film portraits; the Royal Academy of Arts is inaugurating its new galleries in Burlington Gardens...
It is tempting to think of Tacita Dean as a witchy presence in the world, a diviner of hidden forces. Her chosen medium is an antique one: spooled film. Waiting is a big part of her method, and watching; there is also an alertness to chance and coincidence. She is a lifelong collector of four-leaf clovers; a sometime chaser of solar eclipses. One...