Tate Modern
Sigmar Polke: Alibis, Tate ModernThursday, 09 October 2014
England is in the throes of an unusual Teutonic love fest, and in 2014 no doubt deliberately. Music of course has always been omnipresent: Bach to Wagner, and a passion for Beethoven and Schubert that knows no bounds. But there has been a love-hate... Read more... |
Malevich, Tate ModernThursday, 17 July 2014
The year 1915 was a big one for Kazimir Malevich, as it was for the course of modern art. It was the year the Black Square was first exhibited (June 1915 is the likeliest date of the painting’s execution, though Malevich himself dated it to 1913,... Read more... |
Richard Hamilton, Tate Modern /ICAWednesday, 12 February 2014
Some artists are diminished by major retrospectives, including those artists we consider great. A gap opens up between what you see and what you hear, which is why you can never judge work with your ears, or at least your ears and nothing else. The... Read more... |
Paul Klee: Making Visible, Tate ModernTuesday, 15 October 2013
"The objects in pictures look out at us serene or severe, tense or relaxed, comforting or forbidding, suffering or smiling." Thus said Paul Klee (1879-1940) in a lecture on modern art in 1924. It is an entirely accurate description of his own work,... Read more... |
Ellen Gallagher: AxME, Tate ModernWednesday, 01 May 2013
Ellen Gallagher is obsessed by the issue of black cultural identity; but if that sounds tedious or tendentious, think again. She explores her theme in work that is so varied, so beautiful and so humorous that the furrow she ploughs seems more like... Read more... |
Saloua Raouda Choucair, Tate ModernFriday, 19 April 2013
Saloua Raouda Choucair began her career as a painter, initially studying under Lebanon’s two leading landscape artists, Mustafa Farroukh and Omar Onsi. In the late 1940s, she trained in the studio of Fernande Léger while studying at the Ecole des... Read more... |
Lichtenstein: A Retrospective, Tate ModernTuesday, 19 February 2013
Towards the end of Tate Modern’s retrospective of Roy Lichtenstein, there is a small abstract painting, Untitled, 1959, executed just before the artist found himself at the heart of the Pop Art movement. The painting is, by any measure, a failure.... Read more... |
Kraftwerk: The Man Machine, Tate ModernSunday, 10 February 2013
A giant arm sweeps across the rapt audience. The newly anointed onlookers all wear the same, white-framed, glasses. A chant is heard:“We are the robots.” Those congregating in the over-sized shoebox of Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall could be at a cult... Read more... |
Kraftwerk: Radio-Activity, Tate ModernFriday, 08 February 2013
“Tschernobyl… Harrisburg... Sellafield… Fukushima” reads the display above the four figures standing impassively below like toys, suddenly turning these harbingers of the computer age into proselytisers for an anti-nuclear energy policy.Kraftwerk’s... Read more... |
Kraftwerk: Autobahn, Tate ModernThursday, 07 February 2013
Childlike wonder is a rare emotion at a gig, so gasps of delight are doubly jolting as the first images appear to float out of the mammoth screen behind the stage and float over our heads. These are notes of musical notation that cascade from a car... Read more... |
A Bigger Splash: Painting After Performance, Tate ModernThursday, 15 November 2012
A Bigger Splash... opens with Hans Namuth’s famous 1951 film of Jackson Pollock balletically dripping, flicking and pouring paint onto the canvas at his feet. Beneath the screen a long, scroll-like painting by Pollock lies on the gallery floor. The... Read more... |
William Klein + Daido Moriyama, Tate ModernThursday, 11 October 2012
William Klein’s exhibition opens with Broadway by Light (1958), a celluloid elegy to advertising made in the days before neon. Myriad bulbs flash the names of brands like Coca Cola, Camel, Budweiser and Pepsi across New York’s night sky. Silhouetted... Read more... |
