Tate Modern

Tate Modern

Tate Modern is the national gallery of international modern art. Located in London, it is one of the family of four Tate galleries which display selections from the Tate Collection. The Collection comprises the national collection of British art from the year 1500 to the present day, and of international modern art.
Created in the year 2000 from a disused power station in the heart of London, Tate Modern displays the national collection of international modern art. This is defined as art since 1900.

Stream

Tate Modern
Tate Modern
17/02/2010

Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective

  • Arshile Gorky Landscape Table 1945 © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2010 © Arshile Gorky Estate

Tate Modern presents the first major retrospective of Arshile Gorky (c.1904-1948) to be seen in Europe for twenty years. Celebrating one of the most powerful and poetic American artists of his generation, Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective examines the extraordinary contribution of this seminal figure in Abstract Expressionism. The exhibition spans Gorky's 25 year career and offers the opportunity to see this complex and moving body of work as a whole. It includes more than 120 paintings and works on paper, many of which have not been shown in the UK previously.
 
With little formal academic training, Arshile Gorky absorbed European Modernism through both his studies and teaching and went on to become a pivotal figure in mid-century American art. In New York in 1941, Gorky encountered the exiled European Surrealists, whose leader, André Breton, welcomed him as part of their movement. His lyrical abstractions anticipated Abstract Expressionism, which emerged in 1940s New York amongst a circle of artists who valued spontaneity of expression and individuality, including Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko. Gorky's assimilation of European and American influences resulted in a distinctive synthesis of artistic cultures. Paralleling the Surrealists' idea of automatism - the free flowing release of the hand from conscious control of the mind - he forged an entirely new type of abstract painting.
 
Structured around a number of significant moments in Gorky's oeuvre and arranged broadly chronologically, the exhibition reveals the evolution of Gorky's visual vocabulary. It reassesses work from the 1920s and 1930s throwing light on the significance of early developments in his practice. Highlights include the remarkable pair of paintings The Artist and his Mother (circa 1926-36, Whitney Museum of American Art, and 1929-42, National Gallery of Art, Washington) which act as memorials to Gorky's lost childhood and confrontations with exile.
 
The show also brings together many of the renowned works from Gorky's artistic breakthrough in the 1940s. After his marriage in 1941, Gorky spent much of his time in the countryside. His experience of the American landscape, combined with memories of his father's farm near Lake Van, inspired lyrical works of nature-based abstraction.  Examples of this period include Waterfall 1943 (Tate), one of Gorky's most luscious abstractions from the landscape where biomorphic forms, rendered with thinned-out washes of paint, create veils of colour marked with gestures. Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective includes other key works from this period of radical development demonstrating the balance Gorky found between energy and fine control in his mature work. Highlights include Landscape Table, circa 1945 (Centre Pompidou) and the three paintings of The Betrothal series 1947 (Yale University Art Gallery, MOCA Los Angeles, and Whitney Museum of American Art).

Gorky was born Vosdanig Adoian in Western Armenia, probably in 1904, and fled the massacres of 1915. Arriving in America in 1920, he reinvented himself as Arshile Gorky. He became friends with many of the city's emerging avant-garde artists, including Stuart Davis, Willem de Kooning, John Graham, Isamu Noguchi, and David Smith. He studied at the Grand Central School of Art, later becoming an art instructor there at the age of 22.

Enquiries

Date
10 February – 3 May 2010
Address
Tate Modern
 
Bankside London SE1 9TG
Phone
020 7887 8888
Email
visiting.modern@tate.org.uk
URL
http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/

Stream

Tate Modern
Tate Modern
22/10/2009


CURRENT EXHIBITION

Pop Life: Art in a Material World
Thursday 1 October 2009 - Sunday 17 January 2010


Tate_1


Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas, The Shop, 6 c-type prints, each 76.1 x 91.5cm; White Cube © Tracey Emin. DACS 2009.
Photo: Carl Freedman


Pop Life: Art in a Material World proposes a re-reading of one of the major legacies of Pop Art. The exhibition takes Andy Warhol's notorious provocation that 'good business is the best art' as a starting point in reconsidering the legacy of Pop Art and the influence of the movement's chief protagonist. Pop Life: Art in a Material World looks ahead to the various ways that artists since the 1980s have engaged with mass media and cultivated artistic personas creating their own signature 'brands'. Among the artists represented are Tracey Emin, Keith Haring, Damien Hirst, Martin Kippenberger, Jeff Koons, Takashi Murakami and Richard Prince.
Pop Life: Art in a Material World argues that Warhol's most radical lesson is reflected in the work of artists of subsequent generations who, rather than simply representing or commenting upon our mass media culture, have infiltrated the publicity machine and the marketplace as a deliberate strategy. Harnessing the power of the celebrity system and expanding their reach beyond the art world and into the wider world of commerce, these artists exploit channels that engage audiences both inside and outside the gallery. The conflation of culture and commerce is typically seen as a betrayal of the values associated with modern art; this exhibition contends that, for many artists working after Warhol, to cross this line is to engage with modern life on its own terms.
The show begins with a focused look at Warhol's late work, examining his related initiatives as a television personality, paparazzo, and publishing impresario. Highlights include a number of works from his initially controversial series known as the Retrospectives or Reversals. Reprising his celebrated Pop icons from the 1960s, in a manner initially deemed cynical, the Retrospectives look ahead to installations by a number of artists including Martin Kippenberger and Tracey Emin, who overtly engage the self-mythologizing impulse manipulating their personas as a medium, like silkscreen or paint.
Pop Life: Art in a Material World includes reconstructions of both Keith Haring's Pop Shop and Jeff Koons's seldom reunited Made in Heaven. Haring opened the Pop Shop in 1986 on New York's Lafayette St. to merchandise his branded artistic signature as editioned objects such as t-shirts, toys and magnets aimed at as wide an audience as possible. Jeff Koons's Made in Heaven, which debuted at the Venice Bienniale in 1990, immortalized his marital union with the Italian porn star and politician known as La Cicciolina. A specially-commissioned new installation by the celebrated Japanese artist Takashi Murakami debuts in the exhibition's final gallery.
A gallery dedicated to the so-called 'Young British Artists' focuses on their early performative exploits including ephemera from Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas's shop in Bethnal Green where they created and sold their work. Renowned pieces such as Gavin Turk's Pop 1993 also feature, as does selected works representing Damien Hirst's recent Sotheby's auction, Beautiful Inside My Head Forever. Tate Modern will also restage Hirst's performance originally shown at Cologne's 'Unfair' art fair in 1992. Identical twins will sit beneath two identical spot paintings for the duration of Pop Life: Art in a Material World. Tate Modern is appealing for identical twins to take part in this performance.

                                                                                                                                                              

Details:


Admission £12.50
Opening hours: Sunday to Thursday, 10.00-18.00. Friday and Saturday, 10.00-22.00. Last admission into exhibitions 17.15 (Friday and Saturday 21.15).


                                                                                                                                                              

Enquiries:

Tate Modern
Bankside, London SE1 9TG
+44(0) 20 7887 8888
visiting.modern@tate.org.uk
http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/poplife/default.shtm