S Folding Blanket

2016, Farah Al Qasimi

In Blanket Shop, a shop owner in New York City displays a selection of bright, floral blankets. Blanket Shop is part of a series titled Back and Forth Disco that captures details of local communities and small businesses. Connecting with other works such as S Folding Blanket, the print references the material translations bound up with the movement of peoples. Fabrics, materials and textures obscure the location of the image. 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

Balindile I

2012, Nicholas Hlobo

Balindile I is titled in Hlobo’s native language Xhosa, a Nguni language widely spoken in South Africa. Translated as ‘those in waiting’, it refers to the black rubber form that appears to be rising up, in a state of limbo. The rubber is from the inner tube of a car tyre, gathered from repair shops in Johannesburg. The hosepipe appears to be acting as a tether, limiting movement. It could also represent an umbilical cord, signifying growth and possibility.

Gallery label, August 2019

Scruff of the Neck (LL 23/24b & LR 26/27/28)

2016, Nairy Baghramian

Contained Container

1986, Veronica Ryan OBE

Untitled 1985 is a sculpture by the Caribbean-born British artist Veronica Ryan. Its long, cocoon-like form is made of plaster, which is smooth and undulates, varying in thickness and size and mimicking organic shapes. It is divided into six oval-shaped compartments that reduce in size from largest to smallest. Each compartment has a deep bowl-like interior in which has been placed a single, smaller object cast in bronze. These objects vary in shape and scale, and some occupy more of their bowl than others. It is unclear what these objects might be – all are abstract shapes and seem to represent a mixture of natural and man-made forms. The smallest section of the work lifts slightly from the surface on which it is displayed, suggesting that the sculpture is beginning to curl back on itself. The grey exterior of the plaster contrasts subtly with the darker brown-black of the bronze objects, and plaster and bronze are both soft materials that in this case have be manipulated before hardening, with both showing traces of the artist’s hand.

The Earth is an Angel

1987, Shirazeh Houshiary

Houshiary was born in Iran but works in Britain. This is one of a series of sculptures of various sizes in which the wings of an angel symbolize force and energy. The image of a four-winged angel is derived from those found in Byzantine churches in Istanbul where two wings are directed towards earth and two point upwards to the sky. Power, according to the artist, lies at the meeting point.

Gallery label, August 2004

Behold

2009, Sheela Gowda

Behold 2009 is an immersive large-scale installation by the South Indian artist Sheela Gowda. This work consists of four kilometres of hand knotted rope and approximately twenty car bumpers. The bumpers are suspended against the gallery wall, individually or in sets, from ropes made of braided human hair, which are knotted around the metal. The ropes extend irregularly between the hanging bumpers in small and large loops, as well as being gathered on the floor in piles and heaps, some of which can also be suspended from the ceiling. In this way the installation can take over a single gallery space or occupy a single stretch of wall.

Marrow

1996, Mona Hatoum

Marrow 1996 appears to be a direct replica of a children’s hospital cot made out of orange rubber so that it lies slumped on the floor. Reminiscent of a collapsed body, the work’s title refers to bone marrow, the soft spongy tissue found in the centre of most bones that is vital to healthy growth. The work demonstrates Hatoum’s characteristic manipulation of materials and their metaphorical potential. It is in the interface between these that the individual work’s affect resides. Marrow was made at a time when the artist had embarked on a series of works where domestic objects were transformed into uncanny, foreign or alien things and is one of several sculptures derived from an altered infant’s cot. A companion piece, Silence 1994, is a life-size crib made of glass whose potential to shatter threatens any child in its care. Similarly, Incommunicado 1993 (Tate T06988) presents the form of a bare, metal child’s cot with razor-thin cheese wires forming its base rather than a mattress, thereby presenting a place of danger rather than comfort and safety. Hatoum has said: ‘I see furniture as being very much about the body. It is usually about giving it support and comfort. I made a series of furniture pieces which are more hostile than comforting.’ (Quoted in Archer, Brett, de Zegher and Hatoum 1997, p.20.) Untitled (Wheelchair) 1998 (Tate T07497) is another work in Tate’s collection that makes hostile a supposedly safe, everyday object.

Folded Figure

c.1965, Maria Bartuszová

Folded Figure c.1965 is one of a group of six sculptures in Tate’s collection made by Maria Bartuszová between 1963 and 1973, a key period in her career. All six combine one or more organic forms made of white plaster, a material used by the artist throughout her lifetime. Folded Figure dates from a period when the artist was exploring the combination of multiple forms in one sculpture and is one of the earliest examples of these experiments. It comprises four elements piled up one on top of the other, their curving, bulbous forms apparently moulding into each other. Although the appearance of the work suggests the potential for being assembled and reassembled, it was not the artist’s intention that it should be reconfigured. Folded Figure can be displayed individually, or with the other sculptures from the group (see Tate T14516 and T14518–T14521), resting on a plinth, table or shelf. One of the sculptures, Untitled (Drop) 1963–4 (Tate T14516), is displayed suspended from the ceiling.

Relatum

1968, 1994, Lee Ufan

Lee Ufan’s sculptural works focus on the essential character and presence of their materials and their interconnections. Here he uses a single material – one hundred flat bands of stainless steel – and explores how the different elements relate to one another and to the space in which they are arranged. He has explained: ‘a work of art, rather than being a self-complete, independent entity, is a resonant relationship with the outside. It exists together with the world, simultaneously what it is and what it is not, that is, a relatum.’

Gallery label, January 2016

Sculpture to be Lost in the Forest

1932, cast c.1953–8, Jean Arp (Hans Arp)

In the 1920s and 1930s Arp developed a type of biomorphic sculpture that suggested a parallel between artistic creativity and creation in nature. The shapes in his work evoke worn pebbles, buds and other natural forms. He created these sculptures using a quasi-automatic process of sanding away at a plaster model until he was satisfied with the shape. ‘I work until enough of my life has flowed into its body’, he said. His efforts to link his work with nature included placing sculptures in the forest near his home at Meudon, where they could be discovered by unsuspecting passers-by.

Gallery label, November 2012

Untitled

1976, Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian

This work presents a series of volumetric renderings of cubes, placed serially against each other to form an intricate geometric pattern that also reveals interlocking rhomboid and diamond shapes. The reflections formed within its fragmented mirrors can change dramatically, depending on the surroundings and lighting. Farmanfarmaian’s work relates to the geometric forms of American minimalist sculpture as well as the patterns found in Iran’s architectural monuments. Her use of geometric shapes is underpinned by her studies of Sufi cosmology, in which each shape has an intrinsic symbolic meaning.

Gallery label, April 2013

“Untitled” (Double Portrait)

1991, Felix Gonzalez-Torres

Gonzalez-Torres often used simple forms loaded with highly charged emotional and political meaning. The rings could be wedding bands, conjoined to create the symbol for infinity – and eternal love. The use of two identical circular objects occurs throughout Gonzalez-Torres’s work as a sign of ‘perfect lovers’. Their exact symmetry also alludes to gay love.

Gallery label, October 2016

Zero to Infinity

1968–2007, Rasheed Araeen

Zero to Infinity originally consisted of an arrangement of one hundred latticed cubes, arranged in a square. Viewers were invited to interact with the work, freely moving the components into new configurations. For the artist, this act of breaking the symmetry of the cubes through public participation was a significant departure from minimalist practice, and an essential element of the work. A partial display of twenty-five cubes is shown here. For conservation reasons, they cannot be touched. Instead, they are accompanied by a series of images showing the cubes being rearranged in different ways.

Gallery label, September 2012

Poem of Nine Verses

1966–8, Saloua Raouda Choucair

In the early 1960s, Choucair began creating what she called ‘sculptural poems’ using interlocking forms that can be rearranged in various formations. Poem of Nine Verses is influenced by Sufi poetry, Islamic and modernist architecture, and geometric abstraction. Each aluminium piece can stand alone, like a verse in a poem, but also forms a unified structure. In creating this work, the artist ‘wanted rhythm like the poetic meter, to be at once more independent and interlinked, and to have lines like meanings.’

Gallery label, March 2025

Spatial Relief (red) REL 036

1959, Hélio Oiticica

Oiticica suspended this work from the ceiling so that viewers would have to walk around it. He wanted us to become active participants in the work. Only by walking around it can you see the difference in colour and shapes on both sides. It is painted in two very similar colours, chosen for their reaction to light. Oiticica was influenced by the ordered abstraction of artists such as Piet Mondrian and Kazimir Malevich, whose work is also on display in this room. But Oiticica introduced elements of movement and change, emphasising the bodily experience of his work.

Gallery label, August 2019

The Onlooker

1958–62, Ronald Moody

The Onlooker is Ronald Moody’s image of the artist’s role in society. He often used found pieces of wood. He carved this work from teak wood from a ship’s fender. Moody used the grain of the wood to direct his carving. The grain provides the lines of force that complement the stillness of the posture. It gives a sense of the animation of the mind. Moody said his work reflected his experience and presence in Europe and the Caribbean – a perpetual state of friction.

Gallery label, September 2023

Machine No. 6

1967, Shinkichi Tajiri

Machine No. 6 1967 is a large freestanding metal sculpture depicting a three-legged robotic dog armed with gun-like weapons. Most of the body and head is clad in sleek silver-coloured metal panels from which weapons and engine parts protrude. The work is one of ten from the artist’s machine series, made between 1965 and 1968. At the time of their creation, the machine sculptures were the largest works Tajiri had made and the latest in his long-standing engagement with the theme of war.

Familiars

1992, Hamad Butt

Familiars 1992 is an installation comprising three separate parts that are displayed together. These elements are individually titled Substance Sublimation Unit, Hypostasis and Cradle. The collective title for the work refers to the name given to the mythical shape-shifting spectres said to accompany witches. It is also the title of an artist’s book, which was Butt’s last project, published posthumously in 1996 by Iniva and the John Hansard Gallery, Southampton. The work was made in collaboration with scientists and technicians at Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine, part of the University of London. One of the collaborators was Stephen Ramsay, a chemistry research technician and specialist in scientific glassblowing, who fabricated the glass components. They were made at the Chemical Engineering Department of Imperial College, with assistance from both the department of Physical Chemistry and the Toxic Laboratory concerning the use of the halogens included in the work: iodine, bromine and chlorine. Butt himself trained as a biochemist before going to study art at Goldsmiths College, London, where his contemporaries included Gary Hume (born 1962) and Damien Hirst (born 1965).

Abakan Red

1969, Magdalena Abakanowicz

Cocon du Vide

2000, Chen Zhen

Chen Zhen lived and worked mainly between Shanghai, New York and Paris, and his work reflects this constant shifting between cultures, which the artist called ‘transexperience’. In his sculptures and installations he typically assembled obsolete everyday objects, particularly old furniture and candles, sometimes in combination with fragments of technology and consumer goods. This work belongs to a series of sculptures made between 1999 and 2000, sharing the title Cocon du Vide (‘empty cocoon’) and featuring chrysalis-like forms made from Chinese abacus and Buddhist rosary beads threaded onto metal frames.

Gallery label, June 2013

Reclining Figure

1939, cast 1959, Henry Moore OM, CH

In the late 1930s Moore made six small Reclining Figures in lead. This is one of eight bronze casts after one of those lead originals. These sculptures relate to drawings which show that their shapes were suggested by bone or even rock formations. The relationship between body and land was of particular interest to Moore at this time since he had just completed a large 'Recumbent Figure' in green Hornton stone for the architect Serge Chermayeff's garden at Halland in Sussex. Stone could be carved to suggest cavities created by weathering; however, the medium of lead produced a different emphasis. The lead figures remind the viewer of the angular, skeletal framework underlying the human body.

Gallery label, September 2004

Sphinx

1959, Kim Lim

The title of this work speaks of Kim Lim’s love of ancient artefacts. It evokes a mythical hybrid creature, with the head of a human and the body of a lion. While still a student, Lim began to salvage, carve and assemble off-cuts she found in wood yards. This allowed her to create art from building blocks which already had forms and histories. She then combined them into bold and playful configurations. Here, Lim scorched the surface of the wood so different sections would have distinctive textures and reflect the light differently

Gallery label, September 2023

Untitled (Cravings White)

1988, reconstructed 2011, Lee Bul

This is the reconstruction of a sculptural body-costume worn by the artist during her ‘Cravings’ performance at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Seoul in 1989. Hidden microphones amplified the sound of her movements. Lee recalled that her ‘performances were a natural extension of my sculptural concerns’. She has continued to make sculptures, whose monstrous forms deconstruct ideals of the female body. In reconstructing Untitled (Cravings White) long after the original was lost in a studio flood, she reinforced the links between her sculptures and performances.

Gallery label, July 2015

Epidauros II

1961, Dame Barbara Hepworth

The Uncertainty of the Poet

1913, Giorgio de Chirico

The Uncertainty of the Poet

De Chirico’s quiet square evokes the classical arcades and statuary of antiquity (the sculpture is a torso of Aphrodite). In contrast, the passing train and perishable bananas suggest a sense of the contemporary and immediate. The distorted perspective and shadows undermine the conventions of pictorial space and time. De Chirico’s early works were enthusiastically embraced by the Surrealists, who saw in them a dream-like parallel existence. The poet Paul Eluard wrote: ‘these squares are outwardly similar to existing squares and yet we have never seen them ... We are in an immense, previously inconceivable, world.’

Gallery label, September 2004