UK art institutions in first ever collaboration for Tacita Dean project

The work of the British artist Tacita Dean is to be explored in separate exhibitions at the National Gallery, National Portrait Gallery and the Royal Academy, in the first collaboration between the three institutions.

Now based in Berlin and Los Angeles, Ms Dean has produced art using everything from drawings, everyday objects, photographs and sound installations but is primarily known as a film-based artist, in a career lasting almost three decades.

Stephen Deuchar, director of the Art Fund, which has given financial support to the project, said: “There’s a consistent hypnotic, beguiling quality which marks all her work, which I think is going to be appreciated by huge audiences as a result of this initiative.”

Nominated for the Turner Prize in 1998, Ms Dean was elected to the RA in 2008. She took over the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern in 2011, producing “Film” which she described as “a portrait of film itself”. She is the daughter of Basil Dean, film director and founder of Ealing Studios.

For the National Gallery show in March, for instance, Ms Dean is both subject and curator, having been asked to think about the genre of still life in relation to the gallery’s own collection of these works. Selecting 28 works spanning six centuries, including her own 2008 film of decaying fruit, “Prisoner Pear”, she brought “the tradition of the artist’s eye” to the show, according to Gabriele Finaldi, National Gallery director.

Ms Dean’s 16-minute film portrait of David Hockney, created in 2016, has been acquired jointly by the National Portrait Gallery and the RA, with funding support from the Art Fund. The 16mm film shows Hockney in contemplative mode, surrounded by portraits he was working on for his 2016 RA show “82 Portraits and 1 Still-life”, smoking five cigarettes and occasionally chuckling to himself.

“It is one academician of a particular generation viewing another academician of another,” Mr Deuchar said. The film is the first work in this medium to be acquired for the RA’s collection.

The exhibitions at the National Gallery and National Portrait Gallery open on March 15; the RA show launches on May 19.