What's on at Tate Britain

							Exhibitions and displays at Tate Britain

April and May 2011
Tate Britain holds the largest collection of British art in the world
and shows art work from the last five centuries.

Opening hours
Daily 10.00–18.00
Last entry to exhibitions 17.15
First Friday of every month open until 22.00

Admission
Admission is free, except for special exhibitions.

Booking and information
Visit www.tate.org.uk/britain
Call 020 7887 8888
Email visiting.britain@tate.org.uk
Minicom 020 7887 8687

Address
Millbank
London SW1P 4RG
Watercolour
Until 21 August 2011
Linbury Galleries
Tate Britain’s ambitious exhibition Watercolour brings together a
diverse range of material going back to the thirteenth century.
From early records of flora and fauna, of exotic travels and on-
the-spot documentation, to recent innovative explorations into dry
pigment or liquid colour, the show seeks to expand our horizons
and to challenge conventional understandings of what
watercolour means. Always portable, facilitating all manner
of reportage, watercolour has also proved itself to be a serious
and durable artistic choice. The exhibition acknowledges the
association of watercolour with British artists such as William
Blake, JMW Turner and Thomas Girtin, and examines it within a
modern and contemporary context in the work of artists such as
Patrick Heron and Tracey Emin. Watercolour also goes much
further in presenting a medium which has long had a huge range
and appeal; for amateurs and professionals, for show and for
intimacy, for realistic representation and for hallucinatory or
abstract creation, it is a technique consistently open to new
means of expression.
Tickets Gift Aid: adult £14, concessions £12. Standard: adult
£12.70, concessions £10.90. Ticket with Susan Hiller Gift Aid:
adult £17, concessions £15. Standard: adult £15.30, concessions
£13.50. Booking fee applies. Free to Tate Members and Tate
Patrons.
Catalogue £24.99
Part of the Great British Art Debate, supported by the National
Lottery through the Heritage Lottery Fund
With additional support from The Watercolour Exhibition
Supporters Group and the Tate Patrons
Media partner The Sunday Times
Susan Hiller
Until 15 May 2011
Upper Floor
A memorial to forgotten figures, whispers of ‘close encounters’,
insights into the edge of consciousness… Susan Hiller is one of
the most influential and innovative artists of her generation. Born
in 1940 in the United States, Hiller has been based in Britain
since the early 1970s. This major survey exhibition provides a
unique opportunity to follow her exploration of the hidden layers of
our culture through a remarkable range of work, including the
multimedia installations and video projections for which she is
best known. Popular seaside postcards, images of Punch and
Judy shows, films of supernatural experiences, accounts
of extraterrestrial encounters and eerie photographs taken from
the internet – these are amongst the materials Hiller has collected
and reassembled for audiences to experience and participate in,
to explore meaning, memory and perception. A timely focus on
the work of a pioneering artist, this exhibition includes celebrated
works Belshazzar’s Feast 1983–4, Psi Girls 1999 and the
compelling audio sculpture Witness 2000, alongside many other
examples of her extraordinary and diverse practice.
Tickets Gift Aid: adult £11, concessions £9.50. Standard: adult
£10, concessions £8.50. Ticket with Watercolour Gift Aid: adult
£17, concessions £15. Standard: adult £15.30, concessions
£13.50. Booking fee applies. Free to Tate Members and Tate
Patrons.
Catalogue £24.99
Supported by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts
James Stirling: Notes from the Archive
5 April – 21 August 2011
Clore Gallery
It is eighteen years since architect James Stirling’s death, and he
is long due an exhibition. Given his close association with Tate, in
the form of Tate Britain’s Clore Gallery and Tate Liverpool, Tate
Britain is an especially appropriate place to review his work.
Curated by the renowned architectural writer Anthony Vidler, this
exhibition is co-organised by the Canadian Centre for Architecture
(CCA) in Montreal and the Yale Center for British Art, New
Haven. Drawing on the Stirling archive at the CCA, the exhibition
is presented in the Clore Gallery which was designed by Stirling
and opened in 1987. Unfashionable at the time, it, like its
designer, is the subject of renewed interest and appreciation. The
exhibition covers the whole of Stirling’s career, from the iconic
Engineering Building of 1959 at Leicester University through to
the late 1990s, including built and unbuilt projects, drawings,
photographs and furniture.


Single Form
Until 12 December 2011
Duveen Galleries
From Auguste Rodin to Barbara Hepworth, this new display
draws together a wide range of works from the Tate Collection to
examine the human figure in sculpture. Occupying Tate Britain’s
grand Duveen Galleries, Single Form traces the journey taken by
sculptors towards an increasingly abstract depiction of the human
figure, and takes its title from Hepworth’s largest and most
significant work. When the Duveen Galleries opened in 1937,
they were the first galleries in England designed specifically for
sculpture. The inaugural display featured Rodin and other
European artists, and Single Form echoes this, revealing how
British sculpture has always been open to foreign inspiration.
Single Form coincides with presentations of sculpture across the
UK, from the Royal Academy’s Modern British Sculpture
exhibition to the opening of The Hepworth Wakefield.


Romantics
Until December 2011
Clore Gallery
Romance is in the air in the Clore Gallery – a major display
presents Romantic art in Britain. Drawn from Tate’s collection, it
showcases works by Henry Fuseli, JMW Turner, John Constable
and Samuel Palmer, as well as newly acquired works by William
Blake. From Turner’s reinvention of landscape to Blake’s
visionary histories, the display reveals the stunning imagination of
a generation defined by belief in creative freedom rather than
tradition or style. Romantics also looks at these artists’ legacies,
presenting work by Graham Sutherland and others.


BP British Art Displays 1500–2010
Supported by BP


BP British Art Displays 1500–2011
The Collection displays at Tate Britain have changed. While some
of our galleries are closed, we have rehung the western suite
of galleries to create a walk through the twentieth century, with
one gallery devoted to historic masterpieces from the Tate
Collection, and a sequence of In-Focus displays. A number of
these are changing during April and May so do check
www.tate.org.uk beforehand if you are coming to see a specific
work.
In the central gallery off the Octagon we have assembled a
palatial collection of major paintings, hung in period groupings
from the Tudors and Stuarts, through eighteenth-century portraits
and landscapes, to paintings by the Pre-Raphaelites. Highlights
include The Cholmondeley Ladies c1600–10, William Hogarth’s O
the Roast Beef of Old England 1748, Joshua Reynolds’s The
Archers 1769, and John Everett Millais’s Ophelia 1851–2. Beyond
this space is an open sequence that takes you from the late
Victorian period through the twentieth century up to the present.
Artists here include John Singer Sargent, JAM Whistler, Walter
Sickert, Stanley Spencer, Barbara Hepworth, Francis Bacon,
Henry Moore, Lucian Freud, David Hockney, Bridget Riley, Gilbert
& George, Rachel Whiteread and Damien Hirst.
Alongside this chronological hang is a sequence of In-Focus
displays that home in on individual artists or details of their work.
Displays to catch before they close include: Thomas Daniell (until
8 May), Blake and Physiognomy (17 April), Gabo: Prototypes for
Sculpture (24 April) and Marc Vaux (1 May). New displays
opening include Roger Fenton and Orientalist Photography (from
2 May), Restless Times: Art in Britain 1914–45 (9 May), John
Craxton (16 May) and Briton Rivière (16 May), along with ongoing
displays of prints by Barry Flanagan and of political art from the
1970s and 1980s.
On the other side of Tate Britain is a suite of galleries dedicated
to the most recent British art, and especially to new acquisitions
to Tate’s collection. Until 22 May you can see rooms devoted to
Gerard Byrne and Damien Hirst, as well as an ongoing installation
of work by Cerith Wyn Evans and Mike Nelson’s magnificent and
mysterious The Coral Reef 2000. Some displays will change with
new rooms opening in June – come back soon to see these.
Meanwhile in the Clore Gallery, Romantics runs throughout this
period; it includes masterpieces by William Blake, John Constable
and JMW Turner alongside their contemporaries, and modern
and contemporary work that continues and challenges the idea of
the Romantic.
The Multimedia Tour gives visitors an exciting way of finding out
more about the BP British Art Displays. £3.50 (£3 concessions).
Available from the desks near the Millbank and Manton
Entrances.
Supported by BP
Exhibitions and displays at Tate Modern

April and May 2011
Tate Modern presents modern and contemporary art from around
the world in a former power station on the bank of the river
Thames.

Opening hours
Daily 10.00–18.00
Friday and Saturday open until 22.00
Last entry to exhibitions one hour before closing

Admission
Admission is free, except for special exhibitions.

Booking and information
Visit www.tate.org.uk/modern
Call 020 7887 8888
Email visiting.modern@tate.org.uk
Minicom 020 7887 8687

Address
Bankside
London SE1 9TG
Joan Miró
14 April – 11 September
Level 4
Joan Miró’s works have come to London in the first major
retrospective here for nearly 50 years. Renowned as one of the
greatest Surrealist painters, filling his paintings with luxuriant
colour, Miró worked in a rich variety of styles. This is a rare
opportunity to enjoy more than 150 paintings, drawings,
sculptures and prints from moments across his career.
Miró is among the most iconic of modern artists, using a language
of symbols that reflects his personal vision, sense of freedom and
energy. The exhibition includes many of the key works that we
know and love. It also shows that, behind the engaging innocence
of his imagery, there lies a profound concern for humanity and
a sense of his personal and national identity.
The exhibition also traces his passionate response to the Spanish
Civil War and the Second World War. Under the political
restrictions of Franco’s Spain, Miró’s grand abstract paintings
of the late 1960s and early 1970s became a mark of resistance
and integrity. This unmissable exhibition, conceived with the
Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona, tells the story of Miró’s life and
the time he witnessed, revealing a darker intensity to many of his
works.
Tickets Gift Aid: adult £15.50, concessions £13.50. Standard:
adult £14, concessions £12.20. Booking fee applies. Free to Tate
Members and Tate Patrons.


Catalogue £24.99/£35
Supported by Institut Ramon Lull.
Sponsored by British Land, Finsbury, Goldman Sachs, Embassy
of Spain and JCA Group.
With additional support from the Tate Patrons and The Spanish
Tourist Office.


Media Partner The Observer


Gabriel Orozco
Until 25 April 2011
Level 4
Creative, playful and inventive, Gabriel Orozco makes art in the
streets, his apartment or wherever he is inspired. Born in Mexico
but working across the globe, Orozco is renowned for his endless
experimentation with found objects, which he subtly and playfully
alters. His sculptures, often made of everyday things that have
interested him, reveal new ways of looking at something familiar.
A skull with a geometric pattern carefully drawn onto it, a classic
Citroën DS car which the artist sliced into thirds and a scroll filled
with numbers cut out of a phone book are just some of his unique
sculptures.
Orozco’s photos are also on display, capturing the beauty of
fleeting moments: tins of cat food arranged on top of watermelons
in a supermarket and condensed breath disappearing from the
surface of a piano show Orozco’s eye for simple but surprising
and powerful images.
His art also shows his fascination with game-playing. For example
a billiard-table with no pockets and a pendulum-like hanging ball,
or an extended chessboard filled with an army of horses; both are
well-known games to which he has added an element of futility.
This kind of unexpected twist makes Orozco’s work interesting to
both contemporary art lovers and also anyone who wants an
unusual and captivating art experience.
Tickets Gift Aid: adult £11, concessions £9.50. Standard: adult
£10, concessions £8.50. Booking fee applies. Free to Tate
Members and Tate Patrons.


Catalogue £24.99


Global exhibition sponsor Fundación Televisa and the National
Council for Culture and the Arts (CONACULTA), Mexico.
Supported at Tate by Tate International Council and The Gabriel
Orozco Exhibition Supporters Group. Exhibition organised by
The Museum of Modern Art, New York in association with Tate
Modern.


Media Partner The Independent


The Unilever Series: Ai Weiwei
Until 2 May 2011
Turbine Hall
Ai Weiwei, one of China’s leading Conceptual artists and an
outspoken cultural and social commentator, has undertaken the
eleventh commission in The Unilever Series – make sure you
catch it before it closes on 2 May.
Sunflower Seeds is made up of millions of small works, each
apparently identical, but actually unique. However realistic they
may seem, these life-sized sunflower seed husks are in fact
intricately hand-crafted in porcelain. Each seed has been
individually sculpted and painted by specialists working in small-
scale workshops in the Chinese city of Jingdezhen. Far from
being industrially produced, they are the effort of hundreds of
skilled hands.
Poured into the interior of the Turbine Hall’s vast industrial space,
the 100 million seeds form a seemingly infinite landscape.
Porcelain is almost synonymous with China and, to make
this work, Ai Weiwei has manipulated traditional methods of
crafting what has historically been one of China’s most prized
exports. Sunflower Seeds invites us to look more closely at the
‘Made in China’ phenomenon and the geopolitics of cultural and
economic exchange today.
Catalogue £7.99


The Unilever Series: an annual art commission sponsored by
Unilever


Level 2 Gallery: Out of Place
Until 8 January 2011
Level 2 Gallery
The artists in Level 2 Gallery: Out of Place explore the
relationship between dominant political forces and personal and
collective histories by looking at urban space, architectural
structures and the condition of displacement.
Hrair Sarkissian registers the paradox he experienced as a Syrian
artist of Armenian origin ‘returning’ to a land that had previously
only existed for him in family stories, bleak reality replacing the
imagined country. Ahlam Shibli documents the lives of
Palestinians living under Israeli jurisdiction who face relocation.
In her series on Bedouins from the Negev region she also shows
the impact of enforced urbanisation on daily life. In the 1970s, Ion
Grigorescu began filming everyday scenes in Bucharest. His
images of unregimented activities taking place amid the rapidly
changing urban landscape contrast with the regulating social
force of Romanian communism represented by the massive
uniformity of the architecture. Cevdet Erek reflects more generally
on the possibilities of political art. His shadow-sculpture casts text
on the gallery walls with varying intensity throughout the day,
blurring the status of political activism and artistic action.
The Level 2 Gallery programme has been made possible with the
generous support of Catherine Petitgas
This exhibition is a collaboration between Darat al Funun, The
Khalid Shoman Foundation, Amman and Tate Modern, London.
Presented at both venues, the exhibition is supported by the
World Collections Programme with additional support from the
Romanian Cultural Institute at Tate.


Taryn Simon
25 May – 6 November 2011
Level 4
In May Tate Modern will premiere an important new body of work
by the American artist Taryn Simon, who chronicles generational
histories through an elaborate assembly of image and text. In
each, the external forces of territory, power, circumstance or
religion collide with the internal forces of psychological and
physical inheritance. From feuding families in Brazil
to victims of genocide in Bosnia, and human exhibitions in the
United States to the living dead in India, Simon forms a collection
that maps the relationships among chance, blood and other
components of fate. Simon’s presentation explores the struggle to
determine patterns embedded in the narratives she documents.


Level 2 Gallery: Burke + Norfolk: Photographs from the War
in Afghanistan
6 May – 10 July 2011
Level 2 Gallery
In October 2010, Simon Norfolk began a series of new
photographs in Afghanistan, which takes its cue from the work of
nineteenth-century British photographer John Burke. Norfolk’s
photographs reimagine or respond to Burke’s Afghan war scenes
in the context of contemporary conflict. Conceived as a
collaborative project with Burke across time, this new body of
work is presented alongside Burke’s original portfolios. The
exhibition takes place in conjunction with an earlier
complementary exhibition in March 2011 at the Queen’s palace in
the Barg e Babur garden in Kabul, supported by the Aga Khan
Trust for Culture, which resulted from a series of workshops with
Afghan photographers, featuring work by Fardin Waezi and Burke
alongside Norfolk’s own work.
The Level 2 Gallery programme has been made possible with the
generous support of Catherine Petitgas


Artist Rooms: Diane Arbus
From 16 May 2011
Level 3
Diane Arbus (1923–71) is acknowledged as one of the great
figures of American photography who fixed remarkable images of
contemporary life. Her sympathy for her subjects exposed the
variety and complexity of the human condition. This three-room
display is drawn from ARTIST ROOMS. ARTIST ROOMS On
Tour is an inspired partnership with the Art Fund – the fundraising
charity for works of art, and the Scottish Government – making
available the ARTIST ROOMS collection of international
contemporary art to galleries throughout the UK. ARTIST
ROOMS is jointly owned by Tate and National Galleries of
Scotland and was established through The d’Offay Donation in
2008, with the assistance of the National Heritage Memorial
Fund, the Art Fund and the Scottish and British Governments.
Photography: New Documentary Forms
From May 2011
Level 5
This new five-room display explores the ways in which five
contemporary artists have used the camera to explore, extend
and question the power of photography as a documentary
medium. Consisting entirely of new acquisitions to Tate’s
Collection, it includes recent work by Luc Delahaye, Mitch
Epstein, Guy Tillim and Akram Zaatari, as well as two important
earlier works by Boris Mikhailov. Between them they cover
subjects as diverse as the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, studio
photography in Beirut, elections in the Congo, everyday life in
pre- and post-Soviet Ukraine, and power production in the United
States. Each room concerns one discrete project, in which the
artist calls into question the relationship between the
documentary value of photography and the museum as its proper
context.


Tate Modern: Collection 2011
At Tate Modern you can take in the sheer variety of international
modern art in just one visit, from Claude Monet’s beautiful Water-
Lilies to Pablo Picasso’s iconic figures such as The Three
Dancers. Each of the four wings across two levels focuses on a
major art movement, and presents some of the world’s best-loved
pieces of modern art. There’s plenty to feast your eyes on, and
you’ll also uncover each movement’s origins and how
contemporary artists have responded to these artists’ ideas. Look
out for some exciting changes to the Tate Modern Collection
displays during April and May, which may mean that some rooms
are closed.
Material Gestures: Level 3
After the Second World War, artists turned to abstraction and
figuration as a means of expressing the turmoil of life in the 1940s
and 1950s. In this wing, you can see one of the highlights of
Tate’s collection, Henri Matisse’s The Snail 1953, and also
Alberto Giacometti’s elongated figure sculptures. Trends during
this period included Abstract Expressionism and its international
equivalents. You can see famous paintings by Jackson Pollock,
Jean Dubuffet and Barnett Newman, as well as rooms full of
recent works by senior painters Cy Twombly and Gerhard
Richter. New displays see the return of Mark Rothko’s famous
Seagram Murals, as well as a contemplation on the symbolic
value of the colour red by the Polish conceptual duo KwieKulik.
Poetry and Dream: Level 3
The central room in this wing contains over 70 paintings and
sculptures by the Surrealists and their associates, who prized the
power of the unconscious and dreams. Must-see works by
Salvador Dalí, Francis Picabia, Alexander Calder and Germaine
Richier fill the walls. Leading off this main room are displays that
show how recent artists have responded to, or even reacted
against, the movement. For example the Surrealists’ fascination
with the provocative qualities of objects finds echoes in Mona
Hatoum’s extraordinary installation Home 1999, but also in the
exploration of memory in the newly acquired video installation by
Lamia Joreige, Objects of War. Joseph Beuys’s monumental
Lightning with Stag in its Glare has recently been rethought with
the addition of closely related works from ARTIST ROOMS.
Energy and Process: Level 5
This wing is devoted to Arte Povera, the radical Italian art
movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and its international context.
Embodying art of the everyday, these artists used simple, raw
materials to create work that captured natural energies in a
completely new way. In the main room you can see favourite Tate
works by Giuseppe Penone and Richard Serra alongside recent
additions to the Collection by Lynda Benglis, Kishio Suga and
Gilberto Zorio. Elsewhere you can see art works by some of the
movement’s other important artists, like Marisa Merz, Luciano
Fabro and Michelangelo Pistoletto. Arte Povera has been a huge
influence on contemporary artists, as explored in a new display of
work by Mexican artist Abraham Cruzvillegas called
Autoconstrucción 2008. Other new displays include the dramatic
Staircase III 2009 by Korean artist Do Ho Suh.
States of Flux: Level 5
The linked art movements Cubism, Vorticism and Futurism all
started in the early part of the twentieth century and shared a
fascination with change, modernity and urban life. Pablo Picasso
and Georges Braque were called Cubists because the subjects of
their paintings were reduced to ‘geometric outlines, to cubes’. See
their famous paintings alongside examples by their
contemporaries from across Europe. Because of their shared
enthusiasm for everyday life, this wing is also the home of Pop
art. New displays here include Jenny Holzer’s powerful BLUE
PURPLE TILT 2007, part of the ARTIST ROOMS collection and
installed at Tate Modern for the first time.


The Interactive Zone on Level 5 lets you discover more about
works in Tate Modern.
The Multimedia Tour includes artists’ commentaries, archive
recordings and responses by cultural figures. £4 (£3.50
concessions), ID required.
Tate Trumps is a free iPhone and iPod Touch card game you play
with Tate Modern’s art collection. Download from www.tate.org.uk
or from the iTunes Store, or hire a device in the gallery.
Interactive Zone, Tate Multimedia and Tate Trumps
sponsored by Bloomberg