Mail-Formular
Pressekontakt
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.
Pressetext
KünstlerInnen: Tacita Dean
