Tacita Dean - Just as lines can connect up different points, the artist connects up different media–film, photography, drawing, and books–in her work. She compares film to 'drawing with light', she overpaints photographs, and photographs drawings

Tacita Dean, Selected Writings 1992-2011, Steidl, 2012.


Seven Books Grey is an updated, expanded version of Tacita Dean’s Seven Books (2003), and is an exploration of Dean’s oeuvre as it straddles film, drawing, photography, writing and book-making. Each book has a different focusand together they are an accurate survey of Dean’s work to date.
Book One: “Complete Works and Filmography 1991–2011”
Book Two: “Selected Writings 1992–2011” (Dean’s writings)
Book Three: “A Panegyric, Gaeta, Edwin Parker” (three projects made with and about Cy Twombly)
Book Four: “Film Works with Merce Cunningham”
Book Five: “Footage” (artist’s book with a text by Marina Warner taking a cultural-historical lookat the foot and the significance of limping)
Book Six: “Post-War Germany and ‘Objective Chance’: W.G. Sebald, Joseph Beuys and Tacita Dean” (essay by Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes)
Book Seven: “Essays on the Work of Tacita Dean” (texts by Wolfram Pichler, Peter Bürger, Douglas Crimp and Achim Hochdörfer)



The title of the show plays with multiple readings of line drawing, the path of 'lifelines' and the linearity of filmic narratives and image sequences. Just as lines can connect up different points, the artist connects up different media–film, photography, drawing, and books–in her work. She compares film to 'drawing with light', she overpaints photographs, and photographs drawings. In her most recent film work Dean concentrates on the subject of the creative processes of representation: in Craneway Event (2009) she documents Merce Cunningham’s rehearsals of a performance in a modernist Ford factory near San Francisco and, in two films about Giorgio Morandi, she plumbs the relationship between the real objects in his still life and their drawn, multiply-overlaid markings on the work surface. A film about Cy Twombly which is being made in cooperation with the mumok will be shown for the first time.