tate modern

Performing for the Camera @ Tate Modern, Feb 18 – Jun 12

18 February 2016

The Performing for the Camera group exhibition is on at London’s Tate Modern, opening February 18 and running to June 12.

Featuring over 500 images, the show purports to explore photography as both performance and utility in a survey of works by artists including Yayoi Kusama, Marcel Duchamp, Cindy Sherman and Yves Klein.

Also included in the survey of “vintage prints, large scale works, marketing posters” is Amalia Ulman‘s ‘Excellences & Perfections’ four-month durational performance on Instagram.

See the Tate Modern website for details. **

Header image: Amalia Ulman, ‘Excellences & Perfections’ (Instagram Update, 1st June 2014) (2015).

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Self Publish, Be Happy @ Tate Modern, May 22 – 25

19 May 2015

Self Publish, Be Happy is celebrating its fifth birthday with a project space at London’s Tate Modern from May 22 to 25.

The organisation, founded by Bruno Ceschel in 2010, collects and studies self-published photobooks through a programme of events, workshops, and live on/offline projects. The London-based collection now contains more than 2,000 publications, and exists as both a physical manifestation of a worldwide movement and, as SPBH refers to it, a “call to action”, aiming to inspire visitors to create books through different photographic and printing processes.

The four-day programme, which runs during the Offprint London art publishing fair, includes workshops, presentations and performances by Simon Baker, Curator of Photography at the Tate Modern, Antony Cairns, as well as ‘Selfie Stick Aerobic’ by Arvida Byström and Maja Malou Lyse, ‘The Smoke House’ by Melinda Gibson.

See the Self Publish, Be Happy website for details. **

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Paul McCarthy @ Tate Modern

Paul McCarthy.
15 May 2013

Running May 19 to October 26 at the Tate in London, Paul McCarthy‘s enormous inflatable sculptures will grace the northern landscape of the gallery in it’s first major exhibition. In typically acerbic manner Blockhead (2003) and Daddies Bighead (2003) are respectively based on Pinnocchio and a ketchup bottle.

A defining artist in elevated trash, McCarthy’s a cult figure when it comes to exploring, critiquing and ultimately parodying contemporary culture within his sculpture, performance and video work, perhaps brilliantly exemplified in his equal parts bizarre and transgressive video for ‘Painter‘ (1995). See the Tate website for more details.**

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Doug and Mikael – Gallery Hijack

Doug and Mikael. Gallery Hijack.
5 February 2013

Gallery hijackers, ‘Doug and Mikael’ struck the Tate Modern and Saatchi galleries in London to show the world ‘how to be art’. The two pranksters each stood in various parts of the galleries with a ping pong ball in their mouths to see how long it would take before viewers started thinking they were part of the exhibitions. As you’ll see below, it didn’t take long at all.

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Managing Madness

5 March 2012

If you haven’t seen Yayoi Kusama’s exhibition at London’s Tate Modern yet, then you should. That’s if for nothing more than to step into the experience of mental illness with her famous Infinity Room at the end of it. Before you reach that spectacular and slightly terrifying installation, though, the retrospective tour of a life’s work provides some fascinating historical insight.

Yayoi Kusama  1965 - Courtesy of Gallery Victoria Miro ( Photo Eikoh Hosoe)
Yayoi Kusama 1965 - Courtesy of Gallery Victoria Miro ( Photo Eikoh Hosoe)

Obviously there are the phases in Kusama’s work covering her earliest Art Brut – style paintings and abstract watercolours of the 50s, her pioneering minimal explorations Infinity Nets and those famous phallic Accumulations of the 60s. Following a foray into collage and film at the same time as of her reactionary ‘happenings’ occurring in the psychedelic 70s, one can see other past motifs return to her work. Collage and watercolour resurfaces after her return to Japan and subsequent voluntary institutionalisation in 1973. The spermatozoa and natural forms of her earliest work return in her acrylic paintings in the 80s and by the 90s her fascination with organic abstraction extends into larger-than-life install pieces of stuffed cushions. The polka dots remain throughout. Continue reading Managing Madness

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It’s all a blur

26 October 2011

To most people in the art world, the name Gerhard Richter is synonymous with blurry photo-realist paintings with echoes of post-war East Germany. Yet, as Panorama, the retrospective exhibition at the Tate Modern demonstrates there is a lot more to Richter than a bit of blur.

Dead - 1988 by Gerhard Richter
Dead - 1988 by Gerhard Richter

Unexpectedly, the gallery known for its resistance to the more traditional curating strategies adopted a chronological hang to structure the body of more than 50 years of painting, photography and sculpture. Starting with the photorealism of the 1960s, the exhibition slowly ushers the visitor into Richter’s thought process. He reveals himself to be a contrary character who has adopted this particular aesthetic that will become his signature as a means to distinguish himself from all the painters in thrall with abstract expressionism at the time. Continue reading It’s all a blur

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