Tacita Dean

Tacita Dean was born in 1965 in Canterbury, Kent. After graduating from Falmouth School of Art in 1988, she studied in Athens for a year before completing her postgraduate degree at The Slade School of Fine Art in London in 1992. Though trained as a painter, she now works in a variety of media. She is best known for her compelling 16mm films, in which the specific qualities associated with filmmaking are of central importance. Ms. Dean’s films are haunted by architectural relics that seem to embody outmoded or bankrupt beliefs, but at their time of execution promised much. In their formal qualities, her films reference other art forms, painting especially. Ms. Dean also works with video, sound, drawings, and objects. Her work occupies a place between fact and fiction. It is pervaded by a sense of elusiveness, a search for something that exists as much in the imagination as anywhere else.

Ms. Dean has had many solo exhibitions, including Witte de With, Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam (1997); ICA, Philadelphia, with US tour (1998); Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel (2000); and MACBA, Barcelona (2001). She has participated in numerous group exhibitions and in 1998 was short-listed for the Turner Prize.

Ms. Dean had a solo exhibition at Dublin’s Hugh Lane Gallery from March to June 2007. The Tate Modern has recently devoted a room to a display of her work held in its collection, and she was also included in the São Paulo Biennale. Her work was recently the subject of an exhibition at the Guggenheim, as a result of her winning the Hugo Boss Prize. Ms. Dean’s work has also been included in many group exhibitions both in Britain and abroad. The largest exhibition of her work to date was shown at Schaulager, Basel, from May to September 2006. A major monograph on her work was published by Phaidon Press in 2006.

Ms. Dean is currently on the Berliner Künstlerprogramm / DAAD residency in Berlin.