BASEL.-The fourth exhibition in Schaulager is dedicated to the work of the English artist Tacita Dean (b. 1965 in Canterbury, lives in Berlin) and that of the Belgian artist Francis Alÿs (b. 1959 in Antwerp, lives in Mexico City). Over the last fifteen years, Tacita Dean has created a body of work that attracts ever more attention as time passes for its unconventional use of film and its unruly beauty.

The exhibition at Schaulager is the most extensive ever for this artist and offers a representative selection of her oeuvre. The particular quality of her work results from Dean’s unusual approach to the medium of film, which takes literally its central features – above all its analogue constitution and the importance of light in creating meaning – and exploits them for her cinematic language. Her films are the most prominent and striking aspect of Dean’s oeuvre, but film, drawing, and narrative are all closely connected in her work. The unusual form of the structure of her work is mirrored in the conception and arrangement of the exhibition in order to connect cinematic, sketched, and photographic images.

The Sign Painting Project of Francis Alÿs is a reconstruction of a single, multipartite project from the 1990s that was produced in collaboration with professional sign painters from Mexico City – namely Emilio Rivera, Enrique Huerta and Juan Garcia.