Gorringes
Lot 4
Tacita Dean (b.1965) Longstone Lighthouse, 1996 analogue photograph 35 x 53 cm. Tacita Dean is an internationally acclaimed British artist now based in Berlin whose photographic works, films and drawings have been exhibited in museums and galleries worldwide. She has been the recipient of many awards and prizes including the Kurt Schwitters Prize, the Hugo Boss Prize and the International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale. Her work investigates history, memory, time and place and the nature of film itself. Her works have often featured the sea. The curator Clarrie Wallis has suggested that this fascination “can be traced back to 18th-century notions of the sublime, where elemental forces were viewed as emblems of turbulent and ungovernable human emotions.” Longstone Lighthouse, the subject of this rarely available image, features in Dean’s film Disappearance at Sea II (1996). It is a still-active lighthouse built in the 19th century off the Northumberland coast of England and is best known for the 1838 wreck of the paddle steamer Forfarshire and the heroic role of Grace Darling, the lighthouse keeper’s daughter, in rescuing survivors. Tacita Dean was born in Canterbury and studied at Falmouth School of Art, the Supreme School of Fine Art, Athens before gaining her MFA Painting at the Slade School of Fine Art, London. Her commissions have been featured in the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern, London (2011), Documenta 13 in Kassel (2013), and biennales in Venice (2013) and Sydney (2006, 2019). In 2018, she had three solo exhibitions (Still Life, Portrait and Landscape) in three major public spaces in London simultaneously (the National Gallery, the National Portrait Gallery and the Royal Academy of Arts).
