tue 13/05/2025

Tate Modern

2011: Mariinsky, Manon, and a German Dane

Highlights of the year are always interesting. Things you loved at the time do, sometimes surprisingly, fade very quickly. I really enjoyed the Gabriel Orozco retrospective at the Tate: I thought it inventive and exciting. But now I have hardly any...

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2011: Belgian Surrealism, Austrian Angst and a Dane in a Madhouse

Last year, like every year, is a bit of a blur. I saw a lot, but all the good stuff seems to have clustered near the end. Maybe an end-of-year cultural bloat has finally settled. Anyway, to help jog the memory, I think I should start bottom-up....

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Damien Hirst's spots go global

Brace yourselves for pure Damien Hirst madness next year. As well as Tate Modern’s retrospective survey opening in April, there will be a “worldwide” retrospective of Hirst’s spot paintings opening next month.The Gagosian Gallery will be...

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Tacita Dean, FILM, Tate Modern

Tate Modern’s lofty Turbine Hall is dominated by a giant CinemaScope screen flipped on its side so it becomes 42ft high and resembles a lift shaft or cathedral window. Instead of angels, saints or sinners, though, the starring role in Tacita Dean’s...

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Gerhard Richter: Panorama, Tate Modern

In recent years it seems we have seen an awful lot of Gerhard Richter. There have been three major exhibitions in London well within the last seven or eight years. One is hardly complaining, since there is always a demand to see “the world’s most...

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Taryn Simon: A Living Man Declared Dead..., Tate Modern

Nezir Nukic, Zumra Mehic and the remains of Bajazit and Ahmedin Mehic

For her latest project, A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters I-XVIII, American photographer Taryn Simon spent four years searching out families the world over whose lives have been defined by circumstances largely beyond their control – not...

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Michael Clark Company, th, Tate Modern

Michael Clark brings dancers into Tate Modern in a long shadow cast by some memorable events from choreographers Merce Cunningham and Trisha Brown. Now the ground on which Ai Weiwei’s poignant porcelain seeds were piled is swept clean and laid with...

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Burke + Norfolk: Photographs From the War in Afghanistan, Tate Modern

A ferris wheel in Afghanistan: 'Simon Norfolk's colours are heightened, and there is a sense of disquieting stillness'

How easy is it to stage a dialogue between two artists when they are, in fact, separated by over a century? And is it really an artistic conversation that takes place or merely an imposition of values by the living over the dead? This pertinent...

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Joan Miró: The Ladder of Escape, Tate Modern

'Dog Barking at the Moon': Miró used recurring motifs in his work, including the ladder, the dog and the moon

I used to love Joan Miró. Those cute biomorphic forms; those elegantly elusive doodles; those engagingly befuddled, cartoonish faces, each staring forlornly out of the cosmic soup of Miró’s playful imagination; and, of course, those bright, jazzy...

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Daniel Barenboim, Tate Modern

It had all the hallmarks of being an almighty car crash of an event. Barenboim? Chopin? Turbine Hall? You might as well have dumped the piano at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. Actually, acoustically, it wasn't quite that bad. It sounded as if...

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Damien Hirst's Tate retrospective - why now?

Damien Hirst is finally getting his first UK retrospective in a public gallery next year, but the question seems to be, “Why now?” It seems both far too late and far too early, especially since Hirst has made no significant work in some years. That...

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Gabriel Orozco, Tate Modern

The show opens with his iconic 1991 piece, My Hands are My Heart, a double photograph of Orozco’s naked torso. In the first photograph his hands clutch a hidden object at chest-height; in the second the hands splay open to present to the viewer a...

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