Blanket Shop

2019, Farah Al Qasimi

S Folding Blanket connects with other works such as Blanket Shop, the print references the material translations bound up with the movement of peoples. Al Qasimi isolates and highlights the beauty of seemingly inconspicuous moments amidst the visual noise of the city. She creates feelings of in-betweenness and disorientation, as geographic references and the boundaries between public and private are intentionally blurred.

Gallery label, September 2024

Kukulkan

2017, Antonio Pichillá Quiacaín

Antonio Pichilla Quiacain is a Guatemalan artist of Maya Tz’utujil descent. These works draw on the weaving traditions and abstract patterns of Tz’utujil traditional clothing. The black, white, red and yellow in the weavings is symbolic of the four colours of corn grown in Guatemala and central to Maya culture. Pichilla Quiacain is interested in the ancestral knowledge of Indigenous peoples and its continuity in the face of struggle.

Gallery label, November 2022

lick your teeth, they so clutch

2021, Rachel Jones

lick your teeth, they so clutch 2020 is a large-scale landscape-format painting in oil stick on canvas. Like Jones’s earlier paintings, it employs a kaleidoscopic palette and boldness of form typical of her work. Here, fiery reds collide with fleshy pinks and acid yellows against the counterbalancing coolness of blues and greens, contributing to the sense of tension created by the competing forms and the interplay of textures. Jones’s characteristic use of oil sticks as her medium allows her to create an intensity of pigment, layering colour and melding different textural layers that result in a tactile painted surface suggestive of a physical, embodied and intuitive approach to mark-making.

I Present Your Royal Highness

2018, Jadé Fadojutimi

Each of Fadojutimi's works sits between abstraction and figuration. The artist shifts between gestures and repeated forms to produce her own distinctive visual language. I Present Your Royal Highness is an exploration of the artist's self. Its title is a knowing nod to the role ego plays in individual expression. Fadojutimi's work explores the fluid nature of identity in relation to the world that shapes it. Her dynamic surfaces capture an ever-evolving landscape of emotions. She likens her paintings to a diary of her experience.

Gallery label, May 2021

White on White

2007, Gillian Carnegie

White on White 2007 is a just off-square oil painting on canvas. Painted in heavy impasto in monochrome white, as the title suggests, it depicts the base of the trunk of a large tree vertically occupying the centre of the canvas and isolated from a wooded area set on a high horizon line. White on White exemplifies the way in which Carnegie plays on the tension between subject and medium in her painting. She takes this interplay to the extreme in her monochrome paintings, such as this one and also the slightly later Black Square 2008 (Tate T12935), a painting in which the black paint is applied so thickly as to make it seem almost constructed in relief. Black Square is the last of a series of monochrome representations of a clump of trees in which Carnegie joined traditions of landscape painting with the idealistic and utopian strategies of early modernist abstraction. It refers directly to Kazimir Malevich’s (1879–1935) painting Black Square 1915 (State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow), while White on White takes its title from his Suprematist Composition, White on White 1918 (Museum of Modern Art, New York). However, rather than create a monochrome that heralds ‘a world without objects’ – the non-objective abstraction of Malevich’s suprematism, Carnegie inverts the concept by planting a conventional landscape at its heart.

Quarta-Feira de Cinzas / Epilogue

2006, Rivane Neuenschwander, Cao Guimarães

Quarta-Feira de Cinzas / Epilogue 2006 is a single channel video lasting 5 minutes and 48 seconds and shown on a loop. It features a ground-level, close-up view of red and black ants carrying coloured confetti across the floor of the Brazilian rainforest. The film starts with one ant carrying a piece of gold confetti over a gritty surface, followed by shots of differently sized ants attempting to grip or drag confetti across soil and tree trunks. As the video progresses it begins to show multiple ants per scene: a pair collaborate to move a disc up a small hill, and a group fights over a piece of silver confetti. The vegetation surrounding the insects becomes denser and the shots show increasing numbers of ants and confetti pieces, the brightly coloured, often reflective discs contrasting with the earthy tones of the rainforest. The video concludes with a multitude of ants carrying their confetti into a dark crevice in the soil. The film’s soundtrack combines ambient noises, such as bird calls, leaves rustling and cars passing, with the rhythmic sound of matchsticks hitting the ground. The latter are intermittent at first, becoming more constant during the film’s second half. The work is displayed in a 5 x 7 or 6 x 8 metre room with black walls and a dark grey carpet, and projected onto the wall at a width of 3–4 metres. The projection area is covered with reflective white paint and positioned at a height that corresponds roughly to the eye level of the seated viewer (see ‘Specifications for the Room’, instructions from Galeria Fortes Vilaça to Tate, 4 April 2007, Tate Conservation File).

Untitled

2006, Glenn Ligon

Ligon’s untitled neon sculpture cleverly subverts the visual language of contemporary America. The glass tubes are painted black with some small abrasions on the paint surface nearest the wall, so that only chinks of light can be seen indirectly reflecting off the wall behind, creating a subtle halo-like effect around the blackness of the letters. The work might be seen to comment on the proliferation of commercial signs and the self-obsessed nature of American society, whilst simultaneously recalling the art historical precedents set by canonical American artists such Dan Flavin and Bruce Nauman.

Gallery label, April 2010

Yellow versus Purple

2003, Olafur Eliasson

DO COLOURS EXIST WHEN WE ARE NOT LOOKING AT THEM?

Why don’t you walk through this space? Look at the shapes and colours that cover your body. Olafur Eliasson uses space, colour and light to create his works. Here, the light shining through the rotating disc of glass makes a yellow shape on wall. At the same time a special filter on the glass reflects the light, and creates a purple shape that orbits the room like a planet. Why do you think the artist has chosen to use yellow and purple? When you stare at something bright yellow, and then at something white, you see a purple ‘after image’.

‘Colour doesn’t exist in itself, only when looked at. The fact the “colour”, uniquely, only materialises when light bounces off it into our retina indicates that analysing colours is in fact analysing ourselves.’

Start Gallery caption, 2016

Gallery label, July 2017

[no title]

1992, Shirazeh Houshiary

These images are made from the layering of words inspired by texts by 13th century Sufi poet Jalal al-Din Rumi. Houshiary has said that the repeated words represent the act of breathing. For her, inhalation and exhalation through the lungs gives a feeling of absence and presence. The prints reveal language as a living organism. The repeated round forms convey a spinning movement, reinforced by the title ‘Round Dance’. For Houshiary, these centrifugal, whirling forces are present in all nature. Round Dance connects culture to nature, and words to biology.

Gallery label, April 2021

History Painting 35 C18/19th. Cadmium Yellow

1995, Maria Lalic

CAN COLOUR RELATE TO A PARTICULAR PERIOD IN TIME?

Maria Lalic’s paintings explore the history of colour pigments that were used to make paint. Each painting is made from semi-transparent layers of pigment that were discovered in the in the time referred to in the painting’s title. The artist was inspired by an old colour chart from paint manufacturerWinsor and Newton. It grouped pigments into six historical periods: Cave, Egyptian, Greek, Italian, 18th and 19th century, and 20th century. There is one painting for each period displayed here. Looking closely at the edges you can see the different paints she has layered to create the final colour of the painting.

‘I think I’m simply excited by recognising a time and place through colour.’

Start Gallery caption, 2016

Gallery label, August 2017

Carpet

1992, Lubaina Himid CBE RA

Carpet draws an allusion to patchwork and the idea that cloth can bear the traces of activities for which it is used. It is part of a series entitled ‘Revenge: A Masque in Five Tableaux’, comprising 12 works that blend modernist abstraction and African textiles and traditions. Himid was born in Zanzibar, a semi-autonomous part of Tanzania, but moved to England shortly after her birth. Her paintings, woodcuts, installations, works on paper and curatorial projects often emphasise the contribution of African migrants to the development of European culture.

Gallery label, September 2016

Dammi i Colori

2003, Anri Sala

Dammi i Colori is a sixteen-minute colour video projection with sound that focuses on the changes to Albania’s capital city, Tirana, three years after a programme of urban transformation was initiated there that involved painting its buildings in a range of vivid colours. The film’s footage consists of scenes of the city filmed by Albanian artist Anri Sala and a voice-over in which the city’s then mayor and leader of the project, the painter Edi Rama, explains his regeneration project to Sala. The film begins with a slow panning view of Tirana night accompanied by Rama’s voice, followed by shots of the city in daylight with audio consisting of street sounds, including the noises of cars, building work, running water and the activities of pedestrians. These day and night-time scenes then alternate throughout the film. The night scenes are set against a black sky, and were filmed from a slow-moving car. In some of these shots, the camera is pointed up towards the tops of the buildings, while in others it points straight out of the vehicle’s window so that half of the frame is filled with brown soil or grey pavement. The daytime sections of the footage were filmed directly in the street and focus on the city’s activity and close-ups of the buildings’ coloured facades. Towards the end of the film viewers see shots of Rama, dressed in a black suit, sitting in the back of the car, and the final frame shows him leaving the vehicle.

Synecdoche

1991–2018, Byron Kim

Byron Kim’s skin tone paintings are portraits of different people. Sitters include friends, family, fellow artists and even strangers. Their names are listed in the works title. The paintings in front of you are part of an ongoing series of around 500 portraits. Kim attempts to represent an individual through a single colour. The absurdity of this gesture is where the humour of the work can be found. The name of the series is Synecdoche. This means when a part of something stands in for the whole. Kim hints towards the importance of the individual in conveying the complexity of society.

Gallery label, November 2021

Shostakovitch 3rd Symphony Opus 20

1981, Aubrey Williams

Red Aquatint

1972, Kim Lim

3Y 3B

1969, Rasheed Araeen

3Y 3B is a large, horizontally oriented painted wooden sculpture by the British-Pakistani artist Rasheed Araeen. The work is composed of six rectangular wooden lattice framework structures, three painted yellow and the other three blue, which are arranged vertically and screwed onto a sheet of hardboard. The hardboard is painted and divided into two halves – the left side, on which the three yellow lattice structures are mounted, is painted blue, and the right side, onto which the three blue framework structures are affixed, is painted yellow. The sculpture hangs from the wall by a series of mirror plates attached to its reverse.

Colour Column on Suede

1965, Jack Bush

Mirror

1964–6, Sir Frank Bowling OBE RA

Frank Bowling explained that Mirror was ‘about making a painting’. He combined different approaches to figurative and abstract work, from op art to colour field painting. At the centre is the spiral staircase at the painting studios of the Royal College of Art, where he had studied. Bowling appears swinging from the top of the staircase and again at the bottom, painted in a very different way. In between stands his then-wife, writer Paddy Kitchen. In 1966, feeling increasingly pigeon-holed as a Black artist, Bowling left London for New York.

Gallery label, September 2023

Talking Music

1963, Paul Dash

Talking Music 1963 is a square-format oil painting on hardboard that depicts the interior of a home in vibrant shades of blue, purple and green. The room is populated by six figures: the artist, his father, three brothers and a family friend. At the centre of the painting, the artist’s father, seated with a guitar in his lap, is seen ‘arguing his point about a musical matter – chord progression’ with his friend Bob Reid, who is seated opposite him, also holding a guitar, while the four brothers seem enraptured by the discussion (Paul Dash ‘Talking Music’, n.d., artist’s website, http://pauldash.squarespace.com/#/new-gallery-2/, accessed 10 July 2021.). Behind them a French door and two windows frame the wintry setting in the garden. The artist has painted the scene so that the viewer is positioned inside the space that appears to be lit just by the warm glow of the fire and fading natural light.

Triptych

1963, Sonia Delaunay

A pioneer of abstraction and an innovator in the fields of fashion, interior decoration, architecture and advertising, Sonia Delaunay’s career spanned much of the twentieth century. Her early abstract paintings attempted to capture the dynamism of the modern city and she continued to experiment with abstraction throughout her life. In Triptych, made in her late seventies, she set herself the challenge of introducing a white area in the centre of the work, making it more difficult to create a unity between the three sections. She wrote this work ‘opened up new vistas for me’.

Gallery label, February 2016

IKB 79

1959, Yves Klein

In 1947, Klein began making monochrome paintings, which he associated with freedom from ideas of representation or personal expression. A decade later, he developed his trademark, patented colour, International Klein Blue (IKB). This colour, he believed, had a quality close to pure space, and he associated it with immaterial values beyond what can be seen or touched. He described it as ‘a Blue in itself, disengaged from all functional justification’. Klein made around 200 monochrome paintings using IKB. He did not give titles to these works but, after his death, his widow assigned a number to each one.

Gallery label, November 2005

Horizontal Stripe Painting : November 1957 - January 1958

1957–8, Patrick Heron

Heron was a critic and painter who championed an approach to painting that assessed quality according to such formal values as the flatness of a composition and colour. Of his stripe paintings he wrote, ‘The reason why the stripes sufficed ... was precisely that they were so very uncomplicated as shapes ... the emptier the general format was, the more exclusive the concentration upon the experiences of colour itself.’ Heron resisted the total abandoning of subject matter and even such works as this have been seen in relation to landscape, the horizontal bands and colours perhaps suggesting the horizon at sunset.

Gallery label, February 2010

Lady with Fruit

1957, Benode Behari Mukherjee

Lady with Fruit 1957 is a paper collage on card that depicts a female figure, seen frontally and positioned in the centre of the almost square composition. She holds a number of brightly coloured items in her hands and lap, and is surrounded by abstract shapes in similarly bold colours, including orange, green, pink, blue and yellow. All of the forms in the composition are made from pieces of cut paper in bright hues that are pasted onto beige-coloured card.

Light Red Over Black

1957, Mark Rothko

In his mature work, Rothko abandoned specific reference to nature in order to paint images with universal associations. By the late 1940s, he had developed a style in which hazy, pulsating rectangles float within a vertical format. He explained that these shapes 'have no direct association with any particular visible experience, but in them one recognises the principle and passion of organisms'.

Gallery label, August 2004

The Snail

1953, Henri Matisse

After 1948, Henri Matisse was confined to bed due to ill health. Though he could no longer paint, he produced many works by cutting or tearing shapes from paper painted in bright colours. An assistant then pasted the cut-outs on a white sheet following his instructions. Matisse found this technique liberating: ‘Instead of drawing the outline and putting the colour inside it ... I draw straight into the colour.’ Matisse got the idea for this composition while drawing a snail. ‘I became aware of an unrolling, I found an image in my mind purified of the shell, then I took the scissors.’

Gallery label, April 2025

Glacier Crystal, Grindelwald

1950, Wilhelmina Barns-Graham

Wilhemina Barns-Graham’s art expresses the experience of being part of nature, rather than viewing the natural world from outside. She combined this with the influence of geometric abstraction. Barns-Graham made this work following a visit to the Grindelwald Glacier in Switzerland in 1948. There, she experienced the monumental shape of the glacier, as well as its light and the contrast between solidity and transparency. This led her to attempt to combine multiple views, ‘from above, through and all round, as a bird flies, a total experience.’

Gallery label, September 2023

Green Garden

1950, Carmen Herrera

Composition in Yellow, Black and White

1949, Marlow Moss

Moss wrote, ‘I am no painter, I don’t see form, I only see space, movement and light’. Moss’s three-dimensional works, which Moss first made in white, relate to the structural grids popular in the Dutch art movement ‘De Stijl’ and the paintings of abstract artist Piet Mondrian. Here, two small black horizontal planes counterbalance a bright yellow section and a network of white lines that stand out from the canvas. Together these white, yellow and black elements interact to create a sense of movement and light.

Gallery label, August 2023

Coffee

1915, Pierre Bonnard

The dining table was one of Bonnard’s favourite subjects. Its associations with domestic routine and conviviality were in tune with his intimate vision of art. Here, the artist’s wife Marthe sips coffee, with her pet dog at her side. The table stretches invitingly before us, so that the painting appears to record the casual glance of someone about to sit down opposite Marthe. As can be seen in the preparatory sketches shown alongside the painting here, Bonnard’s composition was carefully planned and developed.

Gallery label, October 2016

Abstract Painting

c.1914, Vanessa Bell

Vanessa Bell was a central figure of the Bloomsbury group. They were a group of artists and writers, formed in London in 1905. Bell was one of the first British artists to experiment with abstraction. However, this was one of only four purely abstract works she ever painted. They are all characterised by blocks of bold colour. Bell was particularly inspired to explore this approach by a series of modern French painting exhibitions curated by her friend Roger Fry. Responding to these examples, her compositions simplified and her use of colour became more vibrant.

Gallery label, November 2019

Lucretia Borgia Reigns in the Vatican in the Absence of Pope Alexander VI

1908–14, Frank Cadogan Cowper

This is a re-creation of an obscure and scandalous incident from the history of the Popes. In 1501 the illegitimate daughter of Pope Alexander VI, Lucrezia Borgia, took his place at a meeting. Frank Cowper has invented this suggestive moment in which two noblemen part Lucrezia’s dress so that a Francisan friar can kiss her shoe.The room in the Vatican in which Lucrezia Borgia appeared still exists. It was decorated by the Italian Renaissance artist Pinturrichio. Cowper went there to copy it and painted the faces of the Cardinals from their original portraits.

Gallery label, July 2007