Tate Gallery of Modern Art

Tate Gallery

The Tate Gallery of Modern Art ( Tate Modern for short ) in London is one of the world's largest museums for modern art and contemporary art . It is located in a converted power station, the former Bankside Power Station , on the Thames bank in Southwark .

history

In 1916 the Tate Gallery was given the task of creating a collection of international paintings and sculptures from 1900 onwards. As the collection expanded enormously and also gained in popularity, the Millbank location eventually became too small. Offices opened in Liverpool in 1987 and in St Ives , Cornwall in 1993 . Since opening on May 11, 2000, the main collection has resided in the former Bankside Power Station , which was originally designed by Giles Gilbert Scott . Among the 148 designs for the conversion of this power plant into a museum, that of the Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron won . The Millennium Bridge , the first new bridge to be built in the heart of London since 1894, opened in the same year and created a direct connection between St Paul's Cathedral and the museum. In May 2003 the "tate to Tate" boat service was set up with a stop at the London Eye .

development

The museum was originally designed for 1.8 million visitors per year, but in 2012 the number of visitors was already 5.3 million per year. The plan was initially to expand the exhibition area by 60% by 2012 - in time for the Summer Olympics in London . With the additional 23,000 square meters, the museum should be comparable in size to the Center Georges Pompidou in Paris. Financing (more than € 240 million) for the cultivation should come from both private and public funds. The extension of the museum, which was built on the south side of the main building, was initially planned as a glass pyramid. However, this design was discarded and replaced by a futuristic brick building. Both designs came from the architects Herzog & de Meuron. Construction was supposed to start in 2010, but the fundraising had not been sufficiently successful by then. In April 2011, Chris Dercon took office as the new director of Tate. In September 2011 Dercon announced that the construction of the brick pyramid would start in 2016 at the latest. Until then, however, the decommissioned oil tanks of the former power plant will be used as projection surfaces for films and for installations. The Unilever group , which had sponsored Tate Modern with a total of £ 4.4 million , announced in August 2012 that it would stop sponsoring, but would remain a member of society as a company. The opening of the extension took place on June 17, 2016.

At the same time, Frances Morris took office as the new director of the house.

collection

Tate Modern turbine hall

The Tate Modern presents works by the most important and influential artists of classical modernism and the present . Starting with works by Vincent van Gogh , Paul Cézanne , Paul Gauguin and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec , the styles of the epoch are shown: Impressionism , Cubism , Fauvism , Futurism , Expressionism , Dadaism and Surrealism as well as Pop Art , Minimal Art and Conceptual Art . The museum not only shows works by the protagonists of classical modernism and others. a. by Pablo Picasso , Georges Braque , Henri Matisse , Piet Mondrian , Marcel Duchamp , Salvador Dalí and Andy Warhol , but also avant-garde directions such as that of Viennese Actionism or works by Joseph Beuys and a focus on American contemporary art ( Jackson Pollock , Cy Twombly , Mark Rothko , Ed Ruscha ).

presentation

The permanent exhibition is divided into four areas, which do not follow art historical epochs, but arrange objects from different epochs under headings. When it opened in 2000, these were landscape , still life , history painting and nudes . Since the redesign in 2006, these areas have been States of Flux (optimistic mood), Idea and Object (idea and object), Poetry and Dream (poetry and dream) and Matter and Gestures (matter and gestures). There are also large special exhibitions and large individual objects in the former turbine hall, which is now the entrance hall.

Special exhibitions

2016: Georgia O'Keeffe . Catalog.
2017: Wolfgang Tillmans .
2017: Alberto Giacometti .
2017/18: Amedeo Modigliani .
2017/18: Red Star Over Russia.

Performances against sponsorship by BP

Since 2010, the artist collective Liberate Tate has carried out a total of 14 performances against BP sponsorship . In June 2015 the gallery was occupied for one night. BP sponsors the Tate Modern with an advertising impact of £ 224,000 annually. The initiators of the campaign refer to climate change, BP's involvement in the extraction of oil sands in Canada, the 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico with BP's participation and BP's oil drilling in the Arctic. BP causes more CO ₂ emissions than the UK as a whole.