Hünengrab

  • 2008
  • Tacita Dean
  • Blackboard paint on fibre-based print mounted on paper
  • 238 x 456 cm

Following her photographs of centuries-old trees, Tacita Dean composed works depicting a series of megalithic prehistoric stone formations located in Cornwall. This series was inspired by a painting by Caspar David Friedrich that the artist saw in the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, Walk at Dusk (Man Contemplating a Megalith), possibly a self-portrait of the German romantic painter on an evening walk, thus the dual meaning of the German title Hünengrab (giant’s tomb). Painting the area surrounding the stones with blackboard paint evokes the blackboard drawings Tacita Dean created from 1995, a media that introduces the possibility that the works might be erased.

© Tacita Dean. Photo © Fondation Louis Vuitton / Martin Argyroglo

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Tacita Dean

Tacita Dean studied painting at the Slade School of Art (London). Since the mid-1990s, film and photography have been her preferred mediums.

She also works in chalk on blackboards, and paints postcards and photographs using slow, complex methods. Dean’s films reveal great attention to detail, based on fixed long takes. She records the effects of passing time, particularly in the traces left by the activities of individuals, in natural elements such as stones and trees. She develops this theme in filmed portraits of anonymous individuals and older artists. Passionate about cinema, Dean sees the current split between non-digital and digital film as a metaphor for a heightened awareness of time that informs all her work.

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