Tacita Dean

From De Pont's collection

14 Sep - 2 Feb 2020
work in collection

For more than twenty years, De Pont has been following the work of Tacita Dean. In 1998 she was given a solo exhibition at the museum, and two of her 16mm films were added to the permanent collection: Disappearance at Sea I  (1996) and Der Jungbrunnen (1998). The six works acquired by De Pont between 2001 and 2015 -- photographs, engravings, drawings and lithograph and another 16mm film, Michael Hamburger (2007) -- attest to the diversity of Dean's work. Now, for the first time, De Pont will be showing an extensive selection of Tacita Dean's work from the permanent collection in the New Wing.

In addition to films and photographs, Tacita Dean produces drawings which she presents as interrelationships. They have been done on blackboards and thus function both as storyboards and as stills or retrospective portrayals. The blackboard drawing Der Jungbrunnen, for instance, makes the association with Lucas Cranach's painting of the same title from 1546.

Also characteristic of Dean is her concern for the relationship between image and sound. In Disappearance at Sea I, the sound of the lighthouse is a supportive element underlying the images; and for the viewer the perception of that sound seems to shift from reality to the imagination.

Tacita Dean (Canterbury, 1965) belongs, with artists such as Gillian Wearing, Steve McQueen and Sam Taylor-Wood, to the generation of British film and video artists who, partly due to the availability of new digital technology, take on the challenge of analyzing anew the possibilities and qualities of film. References to filmic practices and traditions can also be recognized in the work of Tacita Dean, yet at the same time she develops new narrative and associative potential.