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Published in Flash Art , January 2010
In another work, ‘Still Life’ (2009), Dean filmed the sheets of paper where Morandi traced the position of his objects, moving them around in the search of the perfect composition. These sheets are crisscrossed with hundreds of marks and lines, showing the infinite possible combination that led to each still life. As far as I know, this is the first time they have been made public: an important contribution to art history, but also a unique testament to a lifetime devoted to painting. Morandi’s involuntary drawings - his “accidental Twomblys”, as Dean calls them- are the cartography of an obsession, maps of an immobile existence spent between the four walls of a studio, weaving arabesques in an attempt to sort out that infinite chaos that is life.
Published in The Guardian , December 2009
Tacita Dean is an artist I revere. This year, she’s done the Tate Christmas tree; it is typical of her unostentatious and honest art. An ordinary Christmas tree stands in the entrance hall of London’s Tate Britain. Its only unusual aspect is to be lit by real candles, instead of electric fairylights. Lit every day at 4pm, the candles burn down as the sun sets. Time visibly passes.
Published in Art in America, 23 October 2009
I am in the unique position of still being able to work with Merce Cunningham. I encounter him daily, listening to him and taking my cues from him, as I spend my summer cutting the film we decided to make together last year. His death has meant I have lost the pleasure in imagining him watching it, so in that sense I have lost my muse, but the film cannot change as a result of this: it is about Merce and his dancers, in a particular place and at a particular time. I am just very sad that he will never see it.
http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/features/a-tribute-to-merce/
Published in The Guardian, 10 August 2009
Tacita Dean’s film Presentation Sisters towers above everything else here. The 18th-century philosopher Denis Diderot argued that truly worthwhile art must reject the triviality of theatre – of conscious performance – and instead depict characters whose absorption in their activities makes us in turn forget ourselves. This was an Enlightenment definition of serious art, and Dean’s film, a portrait of women living in a religious community in Ireland, fulfils it. Presentation Sisters homes in on mundane daily activities and finds infinite beauty in them: doing the laundry, preparing breakfast, making a cup of tea.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2009/aug/10/art-edinburgh-enlightenment-eva-hesse
Published in The New York Times, 21 August 2008
“Stillness” is about duration and change, which are the same thing and are also the substance of life and history. Ms. Dean’s film of Mr. Cunningham’s performance is about the sound and motion of history in action: the personal history of one man’s fidelity to the memory of another; the cultural history of a living artist transmitting and rejuvenating the creative essence of one who has died; the contemporary history of a younger artist preserving and honoring all this, and the two men (the piece is above all a portrait of Mr. Cunningham) in her art.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/22/arts/design/22dia.html?_r=1&ref=design&oref=slogin
Published in Artforum, Picks, Summer 2008
Much of Tacita Dean’s recent work in film has been portraiture, and her scrupulous attention has brought forth a range of engrossing characters…
Published in New York Times, 27 July 2008
[Tacita] Dean’s installation looks amazing down here. Walking down the stairs from the museum galleries and stepping into the darkness, you can see only the flickering lights of the six projectors. They look like radiant stars in the night sky. As you get closer to each projection, the imagery comes into view. The soundtrack also begins to kick in, over and above the whirling hum of the projectors.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/27/nyregion/nyregionspecial2/27artswe.html
Published in Art Forum, December 2007
Published in Art World, October/November 2007
Her meditative, often elegiac films create a welcome pause amid the frequent cacophony and discord of contemporary art, their long edits literally stopping you in your tracks. They achieve, with great subtlety, the subversion that others so brazenly crave.
Published in Tacita Dean, September 2007
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