Portraits: Tacita Dean
In Conversation with Tim Marlow
Friday 16 September 2016 6.30 - 7.30pm
The Reynolds Room, Burlington House, Royal Academy of Arts
£12. Reductions £7.
David Hockney RA: 82 Portraits and 1 Still-life
Artist Tacita Dean discusses her films, including her new 16mm film, 'Portraits' with RA Artistic Director Tim Marlow.
Portraits (2016) observes David Hockney smoking in his Los Angeles studio. Hockney has smoked for years. He smokes when he looks, considers or thinks but never when he is painting. Dean asked if she could film him having a cigarette and he replied that he’d be delighted to sit for her smoking. The resulting film is not one but five cigarettes and is compounded in its multiple portrait-ness by the series of portrait paintings surrounding him in the film that are now featured in Hockney’s exhibition 82 Portraits and 1 Still-life.
‘He's thinking about his paintings,’ says Dean, of the contemplative Hockney, as he meditatively takes drag after drag before the camera. ‘He paints, sits down, has a cigarette and figures out what to do next.’
Tacita Dean is one of the most influential artists of her generation. Her film portraits express something that neither painting nor photography can capture. They are purely film. And while Dean can appreciate the past, her art avoids any kind of academic approach. Dean‘s art is carried by a sense of history, time and place, light quality and the essence of the film itself.
Tacita Dean was awarded the Hugo Boss Prize in 2006 and the Kurt Schwitters Prize in 2009. In 2000, she won a DAAD Fellowship to Berlin, where she continues to live and work. In 2014 she became artist-in-residence at the Getty Research Institute and is currently based in Los Angeles. In 2011-12, her piece FILM was the Unilever commission in the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall.
Portraits will be featured in an exhibition of new work by Tacita Dean at Frith Street Gallery from 16 September 2016.
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