Shown for the first time in Milan, the city of his birth, the film was shot in San Gimignano one year before the artist passed away. Tacita Dean has often paused to analyze great figures in art history: in 2002, she made Mario Merz, which captures an intimate moment with the master of Arte Povera. These two films are exercises in contemplation that use long exposures to reveal the unfamiliar facets, obscure details, and stories that have lain hidden under the dust of the painter’s still lifes. In Day for Night (2009) Dean looks at the objects in the studio, and since she cannot touch or move them, chooses to film them in random groupings that stand in sharp contrast to Morandi’s painstakingly mathematical compositions. For the exhibition Still Life, the British artist presents a selection of fourteen works dedicated to the theme of immobility, including two new pieces.įor the first time, the studio of painter Giorgio Morandi, recently reinstalled in the Bologna residence where the artist lived and worked for over fifty years, reveals itself to an artist’s gaze: in Still Life (2009), the black and white piece that lends its title to the entire show, Tacita Dean films the pencil tracings on the sheets of paper where Morandi marked the position of the objects he painted. Tacita Dean’s films are a celebration of slowness and memory: shot and reproduced solely on film, they open a window onto a vanished world, transforming every landscape, object and character into an allegory of time.
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