Tate Britain

Drawing for Free Thinking is a new wall drawing for Tate Britain, designed to wrap around the Manton stairwell. Inspired by the long tradition of twentieth-century constructivism and by David Tremlett’s involvement in conceptual art in the 1970s, Drawing for Free Thinking consists of broad blocks of strong colour, straight lines, squares and rectangles. It explores floor plans and architectural features the artist has encountered at the gallery such as doorways or windows abstracted into geometric shapes. Tremlett and his team of assistants work with pastel crayons which they rub directly onto the wall with the palms of their hands.

Admission

Website

http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/exhibition/david-tremlett-drawing-free-thinking

Ruin Lust

• 4 March 2013 — 18 May 2014 *on now

Ruin Lust, an exhibition at Tate Britain from 4 March 2013, will offer a guide to the mournful, thrilling, comic and perverse uses of ruins in art from the seventeenth century to the present day. The exhibition is the widest-ranging on the subject to date and will include over 100 works by artists such as JMW Turner, John Constable, John Martin, Eduardo Paolozzi, Rachel Whiteread and Tacita Dean.

The exhibition begins in the midst of the craze for ruins that overtook artists, writers and architects in the eighteenth century. JMW Turner and John Constable were among those who toured Britain in search of ruins and picturesque landscapes, producing works such as Turner’s Tintern Abbey: The Crossing and Chancel, Looking towards the East Window 1794, and Constable’s Sketch for ‘Hadleigh Castle’ c.1828-9.

This ruinous heritage has been revisited – and sometimes mocked – by later artists such as Keith Arnatt, who photographed the juxtaposition of historic and modern elements at picturesque sites for his deadpan series A.O.N.B. (Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty) 1982-4, and John Latham whose sculpture Five Sisters Bing 1976, which was part of a project to turn post-industrial shale heaps in Scotland into monuments. Classical ruins have a continued presence in the work of Eduardo Paolozzi, Ian Hamilton Finlay and John Stezaker. Works such as Rachel Whiteread’s Demolished - B: Clapton Park Estate 1996, show Modernist architectural dreams destroyed with the demolition of Hackney tower blocks.
The exhibition will explore ruination through both slow picturesque decay and abrupt apocalypse. John Martin’s The Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum 1822 recreates historical disaster while Gustave Doré’s engraving The New Zealander 1872 shows a ruined London. The cracked dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral in the distance was a scene partly realised during the Blitz.
Ruin Lust will include work provoked by the wars of the twentieth century, including Graham Sutherland’s Devastation series 1940-1, which depicts the aftermath of the Blitz and Jane and Louise Wilson’s 2006 photographs of the Nazis’ defensive Atlantic Wall. Paul Nash’s photographs of surreal fragments in the 1930s and 40s, or Jon Savage’s images of a desolate London in the late 1970s show how artists also view ruins as zones of pure potential, where the world must be rebuilt or reimagined.

The exhibition will include rooms devoted to Tacita Dean and Gerard Byrne. Dean’s nostalgic film installation Kodak 2006 explores the ruin of the image, as the technology of 16 mm film becomes obsolescent. In 1984 and Beyond 2005–7, Byrne reimagines a future that might have been. The installation presents a re-enactment of a discussion, published in Playboy in 1963, in which science fiction writers – including Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury and Arthur C. Clarke – speculate about what the world might be like in 1984.

This transhistorical exhibition is curated by writer and critic Brian Dillon; Emma Chambers, Curator of Modern British Art; and Amy Concannon, Assistant Curator of British Art, 1790–1850. It will be accompanied by a book and a programme of talks and events in the gallery.

Admission

Website

http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/exhibition/ruin-lust

Keith Arnatt was a British conceptual artist who used photography as a way of documenting perfromative acts that question the status of art and the role of the artist. Using recent acquisitions, this display will show the range of Arnatt’s work and his singular use of photography, focusing on his work of the 1970s and 1980s.

Suitable for

Admission

BP Spotlight: The Nature of Common Life: Drawing the Everyday 1800–60

• 1 January — 2 November 2014 *on now

Drawing heavily on the Oppé Collection of works on paper, this display highlights the preoccupation with everyday life seen in the work of early nineteenth-century artists such as William Mulready, JMW Turner, John Varley and David Wilkie.

The works, in a range of media and including several never before displayed, demonstrate artists’ compulsion to observe and depict the world around them, from the bustle of street life to the intimacy of the family home.

Suitable for

• Any age

Website

http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/display/bp-spotlight-nature-common-life

Richard Deacon

• 5 February — 27 April 2014 *on now

Tate Britain presents a major exhibition of the work of Turner Prize winner Richard Deacon (born 1949), a leading British sculptor who first achieved international recognition in the early 1980s.

Consisting of approximately forty works, this chronological survey includes large, mid-scale and small sculptures shown alongside a series of important drawings. The show celebrates his innovative use of form as well as his interest in working with a diverse range of materials.

This exhibition is curated by Clarrie Wallis, Curator, Modern and Contemporary British Art with Sofia Karamani, Assistant Curator, Contemporary British Art. It will be accompanied by a book on the artist and a programme of talks and events in the gallery.

Suitable for

• Any age

Admission

Website

http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/exhibition/richard-deacon

Tate Britain Commission 2014: Phyllida Barlow

• 31 March — 2 November 2014 *on now

Sculptor Phyllida Barlow will unveil her largest and most ambitious work in London to date for the Tate Britain Commission 2014, supported by Sotheby’s, on 31 March 2014. The annual commission invites artists to make work in response to Tate’s collection of British and international art and to the grand spaces of the Duveen Galleries at the heart of Tate Britain.

For over four decades Phyllida Barlow has made imposing, large scale sculptural installations using inexpensive, everyday materials such as cardboard, fabric, timber, polystyrene, plaster, scrim and cement. Her distinctive work is focused on her experimentation with these materials, to create bold and colourful three-dimensional collages.

Drawing on memories of familiar objects from her surroundings, Barlow’s tactile and seemingly unstable sculptures often contrast with the permanence and traditions of monumental sculpture.

Suitable for

• Any age

Website

http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/exhibition/tate-britain-commission-2014-phyllida-barlow

BP Spotlight: Forgotten Faces

• 7 April — 12 October 2014 *on now

Forgotten Faces turns the clock back a hundred years to discover portraits and figure paintings that were once the stars of the Tate Gallery but later fell into disregard as their subjects were forgotten. Offering an insight into the Edwardian world, taste, and the gallery’s history of collecting, it will include Charles Wellington Furse’s Diana of the Uplands, which once rivalled Millais’sOphelia in popularity.

Many of the works on show have been in store for several decades, two of which - Emil Fuchs’s portrait of Sir Joseph Duveen and James Havard Thomas’s bust of Mrs Wertheimer - have been restored especially for this display.

Suitable for

• Any age

Website

http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/display/bp-spotlight-forgotten-faces

BP Spotlight: The Craze for Pastel

• 7 April — 5 October 2014 *on now

The Craze for Pastel marks Tate’s recent acquisition of Ozias Humphrey’s pastel portrait Baron Nagell’s Running Footman c.1795, a rare example of an 18th century portrait of an identifiable black Briton.

This display will explore the emergence of pastel in the 18th century and its phenomenal success as a fashionable alternative to oil paint. Tracing its evolution from natural chalk – long used for figure and landscape sketches – into a full colour medium, the display will include many rarely exhibited collection works.

Experimental pastel drawings by Thomas Gainsborough sit alongside finished portraits by leading pastellists such as John Russell and Daniel Gardner. The display aims to demonstrate the central importance of the medium to the increasingly competitive world of 18th-century British art.

Suitable for

• Any age

BP Spotlight: Source

• 7 April — 14 September 2014 *on now

Source is curated by Tate Collective London, a group of young creatives aged 15 to 25 years. It will be the first display at Tate Britain curated by and for young people.

The display will explore the connections between the dense 19th century ‘salon hang,’ and the visual culture seen in the digital world today on platforms such as Tumblr, Instagram and Pinterest.

The display will include Tate collection works by Patrick Caulfield, Edward Paolozzi and Sarah Lucas, alongside user-generated online content, provoking questions about the historical value of originality and authenticity.

Suitable for

• Any age

Website

http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/display/bp-spotlight-source

BP Spotlight: Alan Davie

• 14 April — 5 October 2014 *on now

Alan Davie (b. 1920) was one of the first post-war British artists to develop an expressive form of abstraction.

This display brings together paintings from Tate’s collection and seldom-seen material from the artist’s archive. His kaleidoscopic canvases, the result of an improvisatory process that the artist relates to his love of jazz, form a complex web of imagery that evokes a magical world of imagination and personal mythology. As well as harnessing his interest in Zen Buddhism and the mystical world of primitive signs and symbols, Davie’s canvases emphasise the materiality of paint and the physical gesture of the artist, their dense networks of unconscious forms overlapping and obscuring others until the final composition is resolved.

Suitable for

• Any age

Website

http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/display/bp-spotlight-alan-davie

BP Spotlight: Chris Killip

• 21 April — 28 September 2014

The photographer Chris Killip (b. 1946) helped shape our visual memory of Britain in the late 1970s and 1980s.This display will include some of most significant series. These include the artist’s first series of portraits and landscapes taken in his native Isle of Man, portraying Manx work and culture.

Shown in contrast are Killip’s widely acclaimed photographs of the north east of England: stark black and white images highlighting the decline of the manufacturing towns and of the docks and the social disintegration and hardship that ensued.

Key images depicting coastal communities living in Skinningrove and Lynemouth during the early 1980s are also included in the display, along with a series of photographs of the workers at the Pirelli factory in Burton.

Suitable for

• Any age

Website

http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/display/bp-spotlight-chris-killip

BP Spotlight: Andrea Büttner

• 21 April — 12 October 2014

The work of Andrea Büttner (born 1972) encompasses woodcuts, glass painting, sculpture, video and performance. She creates connections between art history and social or ethical issues, with a particular interest in notions of poverty, shame and dignity.

A key work in the display, the video Little Sisters: Lunapark Ostia 2012, focuses on a sisterhood of nuns who manage an arcade in a small amusement park in Ostia, near Rome. In it, the nuns speak about their work and respond to questions posed by Büttner concerning happiness, spirituality and spectacle.

Suitable for

• Any age

Website

http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/display/bp-spotlight-andrea-buttner

BP Spotlight: Bodies of Nature

• 28 April — 19 October 2014

Bodies of Nature includes works made between 1780 and 1840 of nymphs, satyrs and other mythological beings. In a period marked by revolutions, catastrophic wars and social and political unrest, these artworks provided an alternative to the austere idealism and morality of traditional high art.

Suitable for

• Any age

Website

http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/display/bp-spotlight-bodies-nature

Kenneth Clark

• 20 May — 10 August 2014

This exhibition explores the impact of art historian, public servant and broadcaster Kenneth Clark (1903–1983), widely seen as one of the most influential figures in British art of the twentieth century.

Clark’s role as a patron and collector, art historian, public servant and broadcaster is explored and celebrated, along with his contribution to bringing art in the twentieth century to a more popular audience.

The exhibition focuses predominantly on Clark’s activities in the 1930s and 1940s when he was a leading supporter and promoter of contemporary British art and artists. Using his own wealth to help artists, Clark would not only buy works from those he admired but also provides financial support to allow them to work freely, offered commissions, and worked to ensure artists’ works entered prestigious collections.

Suitable for

• Any age

Website

http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/exhibition/kenneth-clark

Reception, Rupture and Return: The Model and the Life Room

• 26 May — 12 October 2014

Reception, Rupture and Return: The Model and the Life Room examines the role of the life model for the artist and the changing status of life drawing from the 19th to the 21st centuries.

The display will include unique perspectives of three artists' models from the Tate archive. It will explore themes such as the model as a person, as a political vehicle, as a challenger to convention, and the rethinking of the model during the inter-war and post-war periods.

Suitable for

• Any age

Website

http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/display/reception-rupture-and-return-model-and-life-room

British Folk Art

• 10 June — 7 September 2014

Folk Art is an established subject in many countries; however in Britain the genre remains elusive. Rarely considered in the context of art history, ‘Folk art’ has been viewed as part of social history or folklore studies. This show unites an extraordinary selection of objects, exploring the threshold between art and artefact and challenging perceptions of ’high art’.

The exhibition includes surprising and diverse examples of British folk art, from rustic leather Toby jugs to brightly coloured ships’ figureheads and highly-accomplished carousel horses. The imposing larger than life-size thatched figure of King Alfred created by a master thatcher, Joseph Myatt, in 1960 is just one of the highlights of the exhibition.

While much Folk Art is anonymous, this exhibition also presents works by a number of prominent individuals. Amongst these key figures are George Smart the tailor of Frant, eminent embroiderer Mary Linwood, ship carver and fairground artist Arthur Andersen and Cornish painter Alfred Wallis.

Suitable for

• Any age

Admission

Website

http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/exhibition/british-folk-art

Late Turner: Painting Set Free

• 10 September 2014 — 25 January 2015

Late Turner: Painting Set Free reassesses Turner’s extraordinary body of work during his final period (1835–50) when some of his most celebrated works were created.

Beginning in 1835, the year that Turner reached 60, and closing with his last exhibits at the Royal Academy in 1850, the exhibition demonstrates how his closing years were a time of exceptional energy and vigour, initiated by one of his most extensive tours of Europe. Bringing together 150 works from the UK and abroad, it seeks to challenge assumptions around the idea of the ‘elderly’ artist, as well as his radical techniques, processes and materials during this productive time.

Featuring many large-scale oil paintings alongside drawings, prints and watercolour, the exhibition addresses the sheer range of materials and techniques he embraced. The show also includes such iconic works as Ancient Rome; Agrippina Landing with the Ashes of Germanicus exh. 1839, The Wreck Buoy 1849 and Heidelberg: Sunset c.1840 (Manchester City Galleries).

Suitable for

• Any age

Website

http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/exhibition/late-turner-painting-set-free

COMMON PROJECTS: Call for participants for new teachers' group, Tate Modern and Tate Britain

• 13 May 2014 5-8pm
• 8 July 2014 5-8pm
• 16 September 2014 5-8pm
• 11 November 2014 5-8pm

Tate London Schools and Teachers team are inviting a group of 10-15 teachers to work with us, alongside artists, curators and educators, to form a collaborative community of shared practice. Through a series of conversations, workshops and interventions, Common Projects will develop an ongoing dialogue around art and education, where multiple voices, ideas and approaches are held in one room.

If you are interested in joining Common Projects please send a statement of interest, no longer than 250 words detailing why you would like to be part of the group and what you would like to contribute.

Please include your name, role and school. We welcome applications from teachers from all types of school settings and levels of experience including trainee teachers.

We are interested in teachers who:

- Have an interest in sharing their practice
- Have a desire to discuss current issues and debates in art and education in a group environment
- Are able to commit to six sessions across the academic term
- Are able to commit to one Tate London Schools and Teachers CPD event; (bursary place awarded)
- Have an appetite to participate in relevant events outside of six required sessions

2014 Session Dates

1. Monday 17 February - 10.00-14.00 including lunch
2. Tuesday 25 March - 17.00-20.00
3. Tuesday 13 May - 17.00-20.00
4. Tuesday 8 July - 17.00-20.00
5. Tuesday 16 September - 17.00-20.00
6. Tuesday 11 November - 17.00-20.00

Admission