Exhibitions

This study of the artist Mario Merz complements the exhibition Mario Merz: What Is to Be Done? showing in our Main Galleries until 30 October 2011. The film is accompanied by 'Blind Pan (five monochrome landscapes)', a set of five drawings made by Tacita Dean in 2004 that are part of the Leeds Museums and Galleries sculpture collection, which is managed in partnership with the Institute.

Tacita Dean is one of Britain's most significant artists. She was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1998, and in Autumn 2011 she will fill Tate Modern's Turbine Hall with a new work, the twelfth in the prestigious Unilever series of commissions. In 1997 her work was shown in At One Remove, the first contemporary group exhibition to be mounted at the Institute.

Dean's work is concerned with the sculptural properties of light and space, which she explores through drawing, film and sound. As well as making films, Dean works with sound, photography and drawing to navigate interpretations and narratives of history.

 

Mario Merz

'Mario Merz' was made in San Gimignano in Tuscany, Italy where Dean was invited to a residency in summer 2002. Dean's film* is a study of the ageing artist in the last year of his life. Merz is observed sitting in silence under a tree, a large pinecone in his hand. The film is ostensibly a portrait, but more importantly is a study of light in space and form in nature - central concerns in Merz's sculptural investigations.

Using static shots and minimal movement, Dean's films work from observation, rather than depiction. Her approach to filmmaking is decidedly sculptural: she presents objects in space, fascinated by how light and time inform perception, harnessing silence to study how a particular location, individual or event is located within space and time, reworked through the telling, and mis-telling, of history.

Following this portrait of Merz, Dean created portraits of the artists Cy Twombly, Claes Oldenburg, choreographer Merce Cunningham and, through traces of processes in the studio, Giorgio Morandi and Marcel Broodthaers. Each film examines approaches to looking, using the methodologies of the artists' own practices.

 

Blind Pan

Outside Gallery 4, where 'Mario Merz' is being shown, a set of drawings from 2004 titled 'Blind Pan (five monochrome landscapes)' are displayed. A found black and white photograph of an unidentified landscape is the backdrop for directions that map out a journey. Written by hand by the artist, as if chalk on a blackboard, the filmic instructions narrate the journey of Oedipus and Antigone through the wilderness in a storyboard for an unmade film.

 

Background

Tacita Dean was born in 1965 in Canterbury, Kent. After graduating from Falmouth School of Art she studied in Athens for a year before completing her postgraduate degree at The Slade School of Fine Art in London. She is one of the Young British Artists, and was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1998.

She has had many solo exhibitions, including Witte de With Centre for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam (1997); ICA, Philadelphia, with US tour (1998); Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel (2000), MACBA, Barcelona (2001) and has recently been commissioned by Tate Modern to create the next installation in the Turbine Hall.

 

Additional Information

Tamara Trodd will deliver a lecture, 'Fathers and Feminism in the work of Tacita Dean', on September 7th in the Henry Moore Institute Seminar Room from 6pm.

This event is free of charge and open to all, it is not necessary to book, though seating is limited.

Trodd is a lecturer in twentieth-century and contemporary art at the University of Edinburgh. In this talk she will discuss Tacita Dean's film 'Mario Merz' (2002) in relation to the wider theme of old men and 'father figures' in Dean's work, and will consider the questions this raises of inheritance and artistic lineages from a feminist point of view.

 

*Please note that Tacita Dean's film 'Mario Merz' opens in Gallery 4 from 5pm onwards on Weds 7th September.