Tacita Dean

Tacita Dean who was born 1965 in Canterbury and lives in Berlin is concerned with historical processes and the wealth of narratives from past times that can be evoked in the present day. After a number of retrospectives in the past few years-at the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris, for instance, at the Schaulager in Basel or the Guggenheim Museum in New York, Tacita Dean presented a new work group in her first solo exhibition in Austria. Its subject matter circled the creative potential of recording systems.

The title of the show played with multiple readings of line drawing, the path of 'lifelines' and the linearity of filmic narratives and image sequences. Just as lines can connect up different points, the artist connects up different media-film, photography, drawing, and books in her work. She compares film to 'drawing with light', she overpaints photographs, and photographs drawings. In her most recent film work Dean concentrates on the subject of the creative processes of representation: in Craneway Event (2009) she documents Merce Cunningham’s rehearsals of a performance in a modernist Ford factory near San Francisco and, in two films about Giorgio Morandi, she plumbs the relationship between the real objects in his still life and their drawn, multiply-overlaid markings on the work surface. A film about Cy Twombly which wasmade in cooperation with the MUMOK was shown for the first time.