WEST PALM BEACH, FL.- The Norton Museum of Art is presenting a rare exhibition of acclaimed British artist Tacita Dean. Running through May 6, 2012, Tacita Dean is the first major museum exhibition to focus on the photographic oeuvre of Dean, who is best known for her canon of work on film. Dean created several new works for this exhibition.

Curated by Charlie Stainback, Assistant Director of the Norton, the exhibition explores how Dean’s work in still photography informs her artistic practice when using a 16mm film camera. The Norton’s exhibition particularly focuses on how Dean co-opts found images that she paints, draws, or writes on to draw out latent themes, or create new social commentary. Dean’s photo-based works are known for their dichotomous embrace of fact and fiction.

“Tacita Dean has a sensibility that informs both her cinematic and photo-based artwork,” said Stainback. “This exhibition teases out how the relationship between still camera and film camera has evolved in her work over the course of the past 20 years.”

Dean’s photographic works are also notable for their playful approach to scale. Czech Photos, which are on view, consists of 326 3-x-4-inch, black-and-white photographs presented in a wooden filing box, creating an intimate viewing experience. Fernweh is a multi-panel piece that is 12-feet wide and fills one gallery wall. The work is an imagined landscape which uses four found photographs as its source materials and includes quotes from Goethe's Italian Journey. Monkey Puzzle II, a recent acquisition by the Norton, is 16-feet high. While the exhibition is primarily a retrospective of the past two decades, several of the works that are on view—older as well as new--have not been previously exhibited.

The Norton Museum of Art also just opened an installation by contemporary glass artist Beth Lipman. The three exhibitions—Beth Lipman: A Still Life Installation, Tacita Dean, and Jenny Saville—mark the Norton’s growing commitment to displaying, studying, and interpreting the work of contemporary women artists. This year the museum launched the Recognition of Art by Women (RAW) initiative. Its inaugural exhibition, on view now, is the first major museum survey of Jenny Saville’s work. Over the course of the next five years, the Norton will host five more solo exhibitions of emerging and established women artists.

Tacita Dean is a British artist now based in Berlin and is best known for her films, which do not follow the traditional conventions of storytelling on film. Dean’s cinematic sensibility also extends to her work in other media, including photography and drawing. Currently, her work is on view in the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall as part of their Unilever Series.

Tacita Dean studied art at the Falmouth School of Art in England, the Supreme School of Fine Art in Athens, and the Slade School of Fine Art in London. In 1998 she was nominated for a Turner Prize and was awarded a DAAD scholarship for Berlin, Germany, in 2000. She has received the following prizes: Aachen Art Prize (2002); Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, Italy (2004); the Sixth Benesse Prize at the 51st Venice Biennale (2005) and the Hugo Boss Prize at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2006). In 2003, Dean’s work was displayed in the Arsenale at the Venice Biennale and, in 2005 she had a piece included in the Italian Pavilion’s exhibition.