Tacita Dean was born in 1965 in Canterbury, UK. She studied at Falmouth School of Art and the Slade School of Fine Art before moving to live and work in Berlin in 2000. She is esteemed for her drawings, photographs, prints and sound works, as well as her artists books and texts. She is best known, however, for her films, which she began exhibiting in galleries in the mid-1990s, making her one of the first artists of her generation to dedicate herself to the medium. She is fascinated by the dynamics between the materiality of celluloid and the passage of time, which she employs in the service of narrative, however apparent or oblique, and regardless of her subjects, which include artists, anachronistic architecture and landscape. Characterized by static camera positions, long takes and ambient sound, her films are imbued by an uncanny stillness that elicits meditative forms of attention. Dean’s acute regard for light and subtle forms of motion combine to create singular evocations of sensibility and place, the spirit of the moment and the essence of film itself.
The exhibition brings Dean back to Philadelphia where the Institute of Contemporary Art was the site of her first museum survey in 1998. Subsequent solo exhibitions include Tate Britain, London (2001), Schaulager, Basel (2006), Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2007), Nicola Trussardi Foundation, Milan (2009), and MUMOK, Vienna (2011). She was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1998 and was the winner of the Hugo Boss Prize in 2006 and the Kurt Schwitters Prize in 2009. In 2011, she made FILMas part of the Unilever Series of commissions in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. Most recent exhibitions include the Norton Museum of Art, Miami, the New Museum, New York, and dOCUMENTA (13) (2012).
