About the work

Over the last two decades, Tacita Dean has felt a combination of dread and dutiful obligation at the arrival of the piece of A4 paper from the Drawing Room. A pristine piece of paper holds no material attraction for her and, every time, she must devise a way of covering it without context or continuity. I hate being asked to do this is the artist’s last drawing for the Drawing Biennial. She fully supports the Drawing Room and the role they play in promoting drawing in London but has decided to use her A4 2024 opportunity to make a drawing-as-declaration and beg the Drawing Room to liberate her from responding to the bi-annual blank piece of paper in the future.

Date and country of birth

1965, GB

Career Highlights

In 2018 Dean’s work was the subject of concurrent exhibitions across three London museums: Landscape at the Royal Academy, which featured the artist’s monumental blackboard drawings as well as the 35mm film Antigone; Portrait at the National Portrait Gallery, showing her 16mm depictions of David Hockney and Cy Twombly amongst others; and Still Life at the National Gallery where she curated an in-depth exhibition, assembling work by herself and others, contemporary and historical, and guided by her perspective of the genre. In 2020, Dean was commissioned to create the set design and costumes for a new ballet, The Dante Project. A collaboration with the Royal Ballet’s choreographer Wayne McGregor and conductor-composer Thomas Adès, the ballet was presented in autumn 2021 at the Royal Opera House, London.

Selected recent shows:

Tacita Dean: Blind Folly, The Menil Collection, Houston (2024);

Tacita Dean, MCA Australia, Sydney (2023);

Form, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh (Touring) (2022).