Tacita Dean

Tacita Dean’s emergence in the 1990’s as a young artist of great and growing stature has been recognised in widening circles in Europe and America. She is now one of the most celebrated artists of her generation and this is the first large-scale presentation of her work in the UK since her exhibition at Tate Britain in 2001.

Dean’s work addresses the process of plotting co-ordinates in space and time – she makes connections between past and present and fact and fiction. She draws out not only the objective world, but also our inner world and traces the complex interface between the two.

Works on show at Frith Street Gallery will include Mario Merz – a portrait of the great Italian artist made a few months before he died. The monumental 16mm projection Baobab, which depicts the strange flora of Madagascar and Pie for which Dean filmed the rather sinister flocks of magpies gathering to roost in the trees behind her studio at dusk.

The series of photogravures Blind Pan is a near-black silhouette of what appears to be high, blasted moorland, “The Road to Colonnus”, spread sequentially over five large frames across which chalk words take the form of stage directions for Oedipus’ and Antigone’s journey through the wilderness.

In conjunction with this exhibition Tacita Dean’s most ambitious film work to date – Boots, receives its UK premier at the Royal Institute of British Architects. The three screen 16mm film is a study of memory, architecture and time. Filmed in a deserted Art-Deco villa called the casa Serralves in Porto, Portugal. Its central figure, the charismatic figure ‘Boots’ tours the empty rooms of the grand house recounting perhaps real, perhaps fictional tales of the past lives and loves of those who may once of inhabited this place.

Boots is presented in conjunction with The Royal Institute of British Architects, Frith Street Gallery, London and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York / Paris.