Tacita Dean @ Kunsthaus Bregenz

Tacita Dean
Kunsthaus Bregenz
20 October 2018 - 6 January 2019

The work of the renowned British European artist Tacita Dean has already been seen at Kunsthaus Bregenz in 2003/2004 as part of the group exhibition Remind... with Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Anri Sala, and Jane and Louise Wilson. She is regarded as one of today’s most outstanding artists. Her subject matter is often historical, touching on memory and empathy, the forces of nature and the traces left behind by humanity. Her works, from her early chalk on blackboard drawings to her four or more leaf clover collection, round stones, and found postcard interventions become ardent witnesses to a lost past, and the desire to capture, in imagery, the incomprehensible. Tacita Dean’s works in film also demonstrate her insistence on a medium’s materiality reinforcing her stance against a work’s arbitrary and careless exhibition. When the last laboratory printing 16mm film was suddenly closed in London in 2011, she began her campaign to preserve the medium of photochemical film by writing an article published in The Guardian newspaper.

Tacita Dean’s graphic work interrelates the medium of film, photography, drawing, and books. Her works on blackboards appear like excerpts from a film storyboard. Her photogravures of fictional landscapes display a richness of forms and diversity of line. Small-scale notation is embedded within large-scale imagery; they are miniscule and personal, her handwriting almost indecipherable. And yet it becomes clear that every scene, every vista, each image is permeated by a directing, scripting, and planning hand.

The extensive exhibition at Kunsthaus Bregenz includes three of her most significant film works – FILM, 2011 made for Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, her six film installation Merce Cunningham performs STILLNESS… (2008), as well as her most recent and most elaborate film project Antigone (2018). It premiered in the spring of 2018 in the new Burlington Garden spaces at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, the third in an unprecedented collaboration of simultaneous exhibitions across three venerable London institutions that also included The National Gallery and the National Portrait Gallery. Antigone is an hour-long dual synchronized 35 mm film projection. Based on the mythical figure Antigone, which is also the name of the artist’s sister, the film addresses time, transience and the mythological, as well as the materiality of film itself.

One of her most important works at Kunsthaus Bregenz is the large-format chalkboard drawing The Montafon Letter (2017) which depicts a mountain landscape, drawn with white chalk on a blackboard surface. The story that gave the work its title is as sublime and impressive as the drawing itself: In the 17th century, an avalanche fell in the mountain valley of Montafon, south of Vorarlberg. Legend has it that a priest, while blessing the dead was himself then buried by a second avalanche only to be miraculously uncovered by a third. Tacita Dean has just completed a second, similarly monumental drawing called Chalk Fall, 2018, which depicts the collapse of a chalk cliff, deliberately matching her subject matter with the medium she has used to make it, while at the same time mirroring the fall of white on white in The Montafon Letter.

TACITA DEAN was born in 1965 in Canterbury, UK. She currently lives and works in Berlin and Los Angeles. Tacita Dean has been awarded numerous prizes including the Hugo Boss Prize (2006), the Sixth Benesse Prize at the 51st Venice Biennale (2005), and the Kurt Schwitters Prize for Visual Art (2009). Tacita Dean has had solo exhibitions in internationally established museums such as Tate Britain, London (2001), Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (2001), Schaulager, Münchenstein/Basel (2006), Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2007), Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, Milan (2009), MUMOK, Vienna (2011), Instituto Moreira Salles, Rio de Janeiro (2013), Fundación Botín, Santander (2013), Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne (2013), Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen (2014), Museo Tamayo, Mexico City (2016), National Portrait Gallery, The National Gallery & Royal Academy of Arts, London (2018). Her works were also included in dOCUMENTA (13) (2012), 55th Venice Biennale (2013), as well as the 19th Biennale of Sydney (2014).

KUNSTHAUS BREGENZ
Karl-Tizian-Platz, 6900 Bregenz
kunsthaus-bregenz.at

Tacita Dean - Print Projects @ SMK, Copenhagen - National Gallery of Denmark

Tacita Dean - Print Projects

National Gallery of Denmark, Copenhagen

17 January - 18 May 2014

The life and death of a budgerigar. A Communist palace on the brink of being torn down. And the brown hessian-clad walls in the rooms housing Joseph Beuys’ installation in Darmstadt prior to their controversial renovation. “I am trying to trap something before it goes,” says the internationally acclaimed British artist Tacita Dean. Now, the Royal Collection of Graphic Art at Statens Museum for Kunst launches a new exhibition series by showing, for the first time ever, a full presentation of Tacita Dean’s graphic oeuvre.

Apart from the basic facts of time and place, Tacita Dean (b. 1965) actually has very little in common with the generation of Young British Artists with which she is often associated. Whereas artists such as Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst took the international art scene and media by storm in the 1990s, evincing no small flair for the sensational, Tacita Dean has quietly worked to the beat of her own drum, evincing a very different and far more subtle approach to art. And even though she has continuously explored new territories in her art, her works are always characterised by a strong sense of cohesion; a testament to an artist who found, right from the outset and with no hesitation, a mode of expression and subject matter that continues to engage and challenge.

Graphic art

Tacita Dean is first and foremost associated with her extensive production of 16mm films. Concurrently with her film work she has worked with a wide range of media, and in photogravure she found the potential for creating the same sense of depth that infuses the images of film. She realised and developed this potential in co-operation with the Danish specialist printer Niels Borch Jensen, who has handled her print work ever since they created her very first prints together. The exhibition in the Royal Collection of Graphic Art is the first ever to focus exclusively on Tacita Dean’s graphic art. Featuring more than 90 works, it shows the majority of her entire graphic oeuvre from 2001 to the present day.

Disappearing stories

The tactile, veiled qualities of photogravure are a particular favourite of Tacita Dean’s as she explores a recurring motif in her art: the relationship between memory and time, fiction and reality, unfolding her theme in a serial manner in storyboards that are almost filmic. Some of the motifs featured in the photogravures are still images from her films, while others come from old postcards, advertisements, and amateur photographs found in flea markets. Tacita Dean uses these images to construct narratives about major and minor historical or present-day events and actions. All of these more or less concrete stories are carried by the same ceaseless fascination with things that have disappeared or are about to disappear. In terms of narrative technique Tacita Dean takes an oblique approach. The narrative is almost never allowed to form a coherent story in the classical sense. The images are torn out of the grasp of narrative, transforming the absence of content into a strong visual presence.

CV – Tacita Dean

Tacita Dean has lived and worked in Berlin since 2000. She has studied art at e.g. Slade School of Fine Art in London and exhibited her work at numerous museums, including Tate Britain, London (2001), ARC Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris (2003), Schaulager, Basel (2006), Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2007), mumok: Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Wien (2011), Tate Modern, London (2011), New Museum, New York (2012), and Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2013). She has also taken part in the Venice Biennial (2003 and 2005) and Documenta 13 (2012). She has received numerous awards, e.g. the Hugo Boss Award, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2006), and the Kurt Schwitters Award (2009). Throughout her career she has written about her art.

Accompanied by book

To coincide with the exhibition the SMK publishes the catalogue Tacita Dean – Print Projects. Article by Chief Curator Vibeke Vibolt Knudsen. Foreword by the former Director of the SMK Karsten Ohrt. 48 pages, lavishly illustrated. In Danish and English. ISBN: 978-87-92023-49-0

National Gallery of Denmark

Statens Museum for Kunst - SMK

Sølvgade 48-50, 1307 København

www.smk.dk