Tacita Dean is one of the world’s most sought-after artists. Already this year her elegiac films, drawings and paintings have been shown in New York, Dublin, Manchester and Salzburg, with ambitious new pieces premiering in London and Paris this autumn. While some of her more famous British contemporaries appear to be stumbling into self-parody and repetition, Dean’s haunting art remains in the memory.

Interview: Ben Luke

Her meditative, often elegiac films create a welcome pause amid the frequent cacophony and discord of contemporary art, their long edits literally stopping you in your tracks. They achieve, with great subtlety, the subversion that others so brazenly crave.

For the past seven years, Dean, born in 1965, has been based in Berlin. When we meet, she is in the midst of completing several works for her upcoming London and Paris exhibitions. On a long trestle table in the centre of the largest of three rooms is a quarter section of one of her new tree paintings, a huge black-and-white photograph of a monkey puzzle tree, whose background she and her assistant are painstakingly painting out with white gouache. Nearby, she is retouching two of her celebrated drawings in white chalk on blackboard: brooding maritime images that were a key element of the work from her student days until her move to Germany. And in the tiny editing room across the corridor, she will soon begin cutting her latest film, a piece relating to Joseph Beuys’ seminal group of sculptures, Block Beuys.

Beuys’ installation takes up seven rooms of the Hessische Landesmuseum in the German town of Darmstadt. The museum recently announced that it intends to renovate the space, which has caused an art world controversy, as many poeple regard the entire environment as key to the work.

“What’s so particular about it is that the walls have this brown hessian, and there’s a carpet,” explains Dean. “Beuys used the carpet – he drew a line on it – and the walls are very disintegrated and patched. They say that Beuys never mentioned the importance of the walls in all the documentation. So they are going to strip the walls, paint them white, take up the carpet, and make it into a white space. And it will totally change the nature of this place. They’re saying that the walls were an irrelevance, but anyone who knows anything about how artists work knows that they always make things in relation to the environment.”

Dean has said that she courts anachronism, and the potential disappearance of the Beuys environment chimes with her previous reflections on enigmatic or unique objects, buildings, and even people, that the world has left behind. Beyond such practicalities, however, Beuys is an important figure for Dean. She would, for instance, almost inevitably have confronted his ghost in making her blackboard drawings, a significant medium in Beuys’ armoury. So her work will take its place alongside earlier homages to the artists Mario Merz and Marcel Broodthaers.

Typically, her approach is novel. “Because of the copyright situation I couldn’t document any of the Beuys sculptures, so I proposed that I just film the walls, which is what I have done. I just went and I filmed all the walls, all the tiny little patches. They are so beautiful.”

Joining the Beuys piece in Dean’s Frith Street Gallery exhibition is her recent film Michael Hamburger. A touching portrait of the poet and translator, the film was shot following an invitation to make a work relating to one of Dean’s consistent references, the late writer W. G. Sebald who, like Hamburger, was German-born and moved to Britain. In The Rings of Saturn, Sebald’s account of his journey through East Anglia, one particularly moving chapter is devoted to an encounter with Hamburger in Suffolk. “I remembered that chapter very strongly,” explains Dean. “I had a very strong imaginative sense of it.”

“It annoys me when people say, ‘you’re using obsolete technology, you’re a fetishist’ … Film is a medium of time. You’re dealing with time made manifest, and that’s really important"