In episode 72 of The Great Women Artists Podcast, Katy Hessel interviews one of the most trailblazing artists alive today, Tacita Dean!!!!!!

[This episode is brought to you by Alighieri jewellery: www.alighieri.co.uk | use the code TGWA at checkout for 10% off!]

Working across drawings, photographs to installations and found objects, Tacita Dean is perhaps best known for her incredibly pioneering and staggeringly beautiful work in film. Interested in capturing the “truth of the moment, the film as a medium, and the sensibilities of the individual”, it is particularly her eloquent 16 and 35mm analogue films that are carried by a sense of history, time and place, which at times become portraits of the medium itself. Painterly, unpredictable, physical and truthful, she has described her films as “depictions of their subject and therefore closer to painting than they are to narrative cinema.”

Born in Canterbury, UK, Tacita studied at the Falmouth School of Art, and earned her MA from the Slade. Rising to acclaim in the 1990s and early 2000s with films such as The Green Ray and Disappearance at Sea, the latter of which earned her a nomination for the prestigious Turner Prize, Tacita now lives between Berlin and Los Angeles.

A royal academician and recipient of numerous prizes, such as the Hugo Boss Prize at the Guggenheim and Sixth Benesse Prize at the 51st Venice Biennale, Tacita has exhibited all over the world, from solo exhibitions at the Tate Britain, The Royal Academy, The National Gallery and the The National Portrait Gallery; between 2014–15 she was an artist in residence at the Getty Research Institute; and in 2011 she filled Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall with her mammoth, 13-metre-high film, Film, which has been described as a lovingly spliced poem of hand-tinted images.

But the reason why we are also speaking with Tacita Dean today, is because she is about to unveil her most recent commission: the set design and costumes for a new ballet The Dante Project: a collaboration with the Royal Ballet’s choreographer Wayne McGregor at the Royal Opera House, London. And she is also the subject of solo exhibitions across both Frith Street spaces, featuring these forthcoming designs, plus incredible films such as 150 years of painting, featuring a conversation between Julie Mehretu and Luchita Hurtado, and Pan Amicus, which was filmed entirely on the estate of the Getty Center and Villa.

Further links:

https://www.frithstreetgallery.com/artists/5-tacita-dean/

https://www.roh.org.uk/tickets-and-events/the-dante-project-by-wayne-mcgregor-details

https://www.mariangoodman.com/exhibitions/459-tacita-dean-the-dante-project-one-hundred-and-fifty/

LISTEN NOW + ENJOY!!!

Follow us:

Katy Hessel: @thegreatwomenartists / @katy.hessel

Sound editing by Nada Smiljanic

Research assistant: Viva Ruggi

Artwork by @thisisaliceskinner

Music by Ben Wetherfield

https://www.thegreatwomenartists.com/