Tacita Dean is one of the most important artists at work today: she has been nominated for the Turner Prize, awarded the prestigious Hugo Boss Prize by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, and has previously exhibited at some of the world’s greatest museums, including New York’s MoMA and London’s Tate Gallery.

Tacita Dean’s films, photographs, and installations construct entire universes out of endless pauses, by exploring distant, unattainable horizons. With her slow, reflective gaze, the artist opens a window onto a vanished world, transforming every landscape, object or character into an exquisite still life in motion. Her films are small revelations and unforgettable epiphanies shot and reproduced solely on film: Tacita Dean’s works are monuments to the country of last things, vanitas describing a world that has been and is no more.

For Still Life, Tacita Dean has chosen to show only films, leading viewers on a circular journey through the halls of Palazzo Dugnani. Presenting a selection of works related to immobility, Still Life is a series of slow, almost hypnotic portraits, landscapes and still lifes. For her exhibition with Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, with the assistance of the Museo D’Arte Moderna di Bologna, Tacita Dean obtained access to the Bolognese studio of painter Giorgio Morandi, where the artist lived and worked for over 50 years. Still Life (2009), a film in black and white, focuses on the meticulous markings and measurements found on the paper Morandi placed underneath his objects.

A cartographer in search of lost time, Tacita Dean rediscovers Morandi’s work through marginal, forgotten signs. Day for Night (2009) looks at Morandi’s objects themselves. Unable to touch or move the bottles and vases, Dean filmed them singly, making random groupings that stand in contrast to Morandi’s studied and mathematically rigorous compositions. Exercises in contemplation, Still Life and Day for Night are extraordinary documents of the obstinate simplicity of art.

Tacita Dean has often paused to analyze great figures in art history: in 2002, Tacita Dean made what became the first in a series of portrait films, Mario Merz (2002)–an intimate moment with the master of Arte Povera. Shown here for the first time in Milan, the city of his birth, the film was shot in San Gimignano, Tuscany, one year before the artist passed away. The exhibition also features the European premiere of Dean’s recent six-part film installation Merce Cunningham Performs STILLNESS... (2008), in which this great American dancer and choreographer poses to the silence of John Cage’s radical composition 4’33’’. Solemn portraits and private examinations of two great masters of contemporary culture, Mario Merz and Merce Cunningham plunge the viewers into a rarefied atmosphere where time expands beyond all limits.

To Tacita Dean, nature is an inexhaustible repository of forgotten stories and unexpected coincidences: with her slow contemplative films, the British artist transforms atmospheric phenomena, pastoral landscapes and abandoned places into sublime panoramas and cinematic frescoes. Her pieces are romantic vistas that harbour unexpected surprises: from the solar eclipse in Banewl (1999)—shot almost in real time on a farm in Cornwall—to the disquieting shadows in Diamond Ring (2002); from the last ray of sun as it passes over the horizon in The Green Ray (2001), to the difficult crossing of a hostile sea in Amadeus (2008), Tacita Dean travels to far–flung reaches to capture impossible images. With the same attentiveness, the British artist films seemingly insignificant objects, like the pieces of fruit cultivated inside bottles for schnapps: a praise of slowness, Prisoner Pair (2008) is a microscopic analysis of the signs of time.

For the mesmerizing, monumental setting of Palazzo Dugnani—built as an aristocratic residence, later the home of Milan’s natural history museum, then of the first school in Italy where art history was taught and currently owned by the Municipality of Milan-Culture Department—the British artist has conceived an exhibition that reveals the building’s majestic architecture and private rooms. Reopened by the Municipality of Milan-Culture Department in collaboration and with the support of Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, the first floor of Palazzo Dugnani is used for the first time as a venue for a contemporary art exhibition – an event that celebrates a new synergy between the Municipality of Milan-Culture Department and Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, both committed to make historical buildings available to wider audiences.

Looking out onto the gardens of Via Palestro, Palazzo Dugnani was built as a patrician house in the 17th century and was then remodelled in the 18th century. The Baroque edifice contains a magnificent fresco by Tiepolo, as well as work by Ferdinando Porta and the Venetian School of the 1700s. Palazzo Dugnani remained in private hands for centuries until it was bought by the City of Milan to house the Alessandro Manzoni secondary school for girls. The layering of personal stories and images in motion makes Palazzo Dugnani an ideal setting for the work of Tacita Dean. Still Life is a unique opportunity to discover this artist’s melancholy narratives.

With Still Life, Fondazione Nicola Trussardi continues to produce works by today’s most interesting artists for the forgotten monuments of the City of Milan. Since 2003 the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi has organized exhibitions with, among others: Michael Elmgreen & Ingar Dragset, Darren Almond, Maurizio Cattelan, John Bock, Urs Fischer, Anri Sala, Paola Pivi, Martin Creed, Pawel Althamer, Peter Fischli & David Weiss, and Tino Sehgal.

Biography