VISUAL are delighted to present Tacita Dean's Manhattan Mouse Museum (2011), a 16mm film which takes a glimpse into the world and work of artist Claes Oldenburg as he tends to an assembly of small curios, objects and artworks. Now in his eighties Oldenburg defined his career by, the transformation of everyday objects into remarkable sculptural forms. This intimate portrait of this ageing artist is created with the observational patience that Tacita Dean is synonymous for.

Dean’s practice often fixes on transience and the effects of time. Through film, drawing and photography she captures subjects and objects, establishing their ephemeral beauty with an eye that searches slowly and contemplatively. Poignantly her preferred medium of 16 mm film is itself almost obsolete giving works made with it, a precious quality.

Manhattan Mouse Museum was most recently shown as part the exhibition Five American’s at the New Museum in New York and a larger body of work by Dean which included filmic portraits of artists Cy Twombly, Merce Cunningham and Julie Mehretu.

Tacita Dean was born in 1965 in Canterbury, Kent, UK, and currently lives and works in Berlin. She studied at Falmouth School of Art and the Slade School of Fine Art. She has had solo exhibitions at Tate Britain, London (2001), Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel (2000), MACBA, Barcelona (2001), and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2006). Recent survey exhibitions of her work include “Analogue” organized by the Schaulager, Basel, in 2006, and “Still Life” organized by the Nicola Trussardi Foundation, Milan, in 2009. Dean’s most recent work FILM (2011) was conceived for the Unilever Series, the Tate Modern’s series of commissions for its Turbine Hall. Her work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, and the Tate Modern, London. Dean was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1998 and was the winner of the Hugo Boss Prize in 2006.

Image courtesy Frith Street Gallery, London