Tacita Dean: PORTRAIT is the first exhibition in the Gallery’s history to be devoted to the medium of film and reveals the artist’s own longstanding and personal interest in portraiture as a genre. The works on display include Dean’s 16 mm films of influential figures such as her major six-screen installation with Merce Cunningham in Merce Cunningham performs STILLNESS…(six performances, six films) (2008), alongside her film of Claes Oldenburg in Manhattan Mouse Museum (2011) and her film diptych of Julie Mehretu GDGDA (2011), all previously unseen in the UK, as well as Mario Merz (2002), Michael Hamburger (2007), Cy Twombly in Edwin Parker (2011), and David Hockney in Portraits (2016). Also on show for the first time in the UK will be two photographic works: GAETA (fifty photographs plus one)(2015) taken in the studio of Cy Twombly and The Line of Fate (2011) of the art historian Leo Steinberg. Dean has also made two new film works for the exhibition, Providence (2017), a portrait of David Warner with hummingbirds, and His Picture in Little (2017), a film in miniature also featuring Stephen Dillane and Ben Whishaw, made specifically for presentation within the Gallery’s permanent Collection.
