The focus of Tacita Dean's subtle but ambitious work is the truth of the moment, the film as a medium, and the sensibilities of the individual.
Tacita Dean is a British European artist born in 1965 in Canterbury. She lives and works in Berlin and Los Angeles, where she was the Artist in Residence at the Getty Research Institute in 2014-2015.
Adrian Searle qualified Dean’s work as carried by a sense of history, time, and place, light quality, and the essence of film itself. The focus of her subtle but ambitious work is the truth of the moment, the film as a medium, and the sensibilities of the individual. Dean has been the recipient of numerous awards including becoming a 2025 National Academician by the National Academy of Design; an Honorary Doctorate from the University of the Arts Helsinki in 2024; the Cherry Kearton Medal and Award, Royal Geographical Society, United Kingdom in 2019; the Kurt Schwitters Prize in 2009, the Hugo Boss Prize at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 2006, and the Sixth Benesse Prize at the 51st Venice Biennale in 2005.
Solo exhibitions include The Columbus Museum of Art in 2025; the Menil Collection, Houston in 2024; the Bourse de Commerce, Pinault Collection, Paris in 2023; MUDAM, Luxembourg, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles in 2022; Kunstmuseum Basel in 2021; EMMA - Espoo Museum of Modern Art, Espoo in 2020; NY Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen and at the Serralves Museum, Porto in 2019; and at the Kunsthaus Bregenz, The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, as well as The Royal Academy of Arts, London, in 2018 as part of a trilogy of exhibitions held in conjunction with the city’s National Gallery and National Portrait Gallery.
Dean designed the sets and costumes for The Dante Project a collaborative production with the Royal Ballet’s resident choreographer Wayne McGregor and conductor-composer Thomas Adés. This new ballet based on Dante’s Divine Comedy premiered in October 2021 at the Royal Opera House in London. In 2011 Dean’s work FILM, a part of the Unilever Series of Tate Modern; and shown in the Turbine Hall marked the beginning of the campaign to preserve photochemical film.
