Celebrated British artist Tacita Dean’s practice spans film, drawing, photography, and sound work. The artist has said, “Mediums are very important, so I like to use lots of them.” The focus of much of her work is film and its visual, chemical qualities alongside its unique way of conveying and containing images. Many of her drawings bear a relationship to found images that exist in film or postcards, seen here in this painting that reproduces not just the image of a film still, but also the physical properties of the chemicals on a celluloid strip. The black-and-white image sits quietly as a meditation of the nature of film and our desire to freeze moments in time and preserve the past.
Dean has been the recipient of numerous awards including an Honorary Doctorate from the University of the Arts Helsinki in 2024; the Cherry Kearton Medal and Award, Royal Geographical Society, United Kingdom in 2019; 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. Solo exhibitions of Dean’s work have taken place at Bourse de Commerce, Pinault Collection, Paris; MUDAM, Luxembourg; The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Kunstmuseum Basel; and The Royal Academy of Arts, London, among many others. In 2011 Dean’s work FILM, a part of the Unilever Series of Tate Modern; and shown in the Turbine Hall marked the beginning of the campaign to preserve photochemical film.