Tacita Dean and Bruce Nauman

Marian Goodman Gallery Paris is delighted to announce an exhibition featuring Tacita Dean and Bruce Nauman. Since the early 1990s, Tacita Dean has produced a body of work across many mediums including drawing, printmaking and photochemical film. From the mid-1960s onwards, Bruce Nauman has continually pushed the boundaries of traditional artistic practice through his exploration of the body, language and performance, and is regarded as one of the most influential artists working today. Together, they present Drawing Blind Drawing (2026), a collaborative 35mm film diptych.

Dean and Nauman met in February 2025, and their first conversation centered on drawing. Nauman was then working on a new series of drawings using gold- and silverpoint, which marked his return to drawing after a break of nearly twenty years. He was also beginning to film himself drawing using a 3D iPhone rig of his own invention, often drawing blind with his mind’s eye and his memory to depict the still life in front of him. Both a mnemonic aid and an exercise in concentration, each drawing bears witness to the infallible link between the mind and the gesture, the image and its representation. As Nauman told Dean, “You can’t go wrong when you are drawing with your eyes closed.” Dean had also recently begun using silverpoint on blackboard surfaces, and Nauman’s blind drawing echoed her own interest in the importance of the unintended act in art and the blindness that her masking inside a 35mm camera invites.

Drawing Blind Drawing, on view on the ground floor of the gallery, focuses solely on Nauman and Dean’s hands as they draw. The film diptych uses two ‘torn’ masks derived from Nauman’s collage, which is also on show in the exhibition. Each film shows different paper grounds; one made with blackboard paint and the other with traditional white silverpoint acrylic. One artist is blind and is assisted by the other who can see. Who leads and who is led changes in the other half of the frame, and in one drawing, they use only one hand while in the other, they use both hands. 

The silent double 35mm projection is over seven meters long and consists of a further double fragmentation, with each of the films itself divided diagonally. The artists’ hands appear in different scales, intertwining and merging. For around four minutes, a choreography of gestures reveals the artists’ focus and dedication to their work as the gold- and silverpoint drawings slowly emerge.