The Echo of an Ancient Form of Knowledge

2021, Edgar Calel

Gallery label, April 2025

Tate Modern Edition #149

2016, Wolfgang Tillmans

Tillmans’ series of 172 unique colour photocopy prints, Tate Modern Edition 2016, was made in celebration of the opening of Tate Modern’s Switch House extension in June 2016. Tate’s collection holds a selection nineteen prints from the series, numbers 1, 9, 21, 31, 41, 50, 60, 70, 88, 91, 101, 110, 114, 120, 131, 144, 149, 161 and 172 (Tate P20633–P20651).

Predecessors

2013, Njideka Akunyili Crosby

Predecessors 2013 is a two-part work by the Nigerian-born artist Njideka Akunyili Crosby. It is executed in acrylic, charcoal, pencil and acetone-transferred prints on two separate sheets of paper that are displayed unframed and unmounted. The left-hand sheet features a single female figure wearing a pink dress, seated in a domestic living-room environment. The work shows the contrast between a modern ‘off-the-peg’ style interior and the iconographic ‘lattice’ – a geometric structure of cement that was used as a ventilation system, as well as a decorative element – typical of the houses in late 1970s Lagos when the artist was growing up. The female subject at the centre of the composition has consistently appeared in a number of Akunyili Crosby’s previous works. She is the artist’s alter ego, a modern African woman who embodies the nature of the African cosmopolitan lifestyle through her costume, style and mannerisms. She is an ‘Afropolitan’, representative of a new generation of African who exists between multiple geographies and cultures, living a trans-cultural and trans-national life. The concept of Afropolitan was popularised by writer Achille Mbembe (born 1957) in the essay ‘Afropolitanism’, in which he aimed to propose a possible new answer to the question of African identity (in Africa Remix: Contemporary Art of a Continent, exhibition catalogue, Hayward Gallery, London 2005, pp.26–9).

Sunset Still Life

2000, Jane Simpson

Sunset Still Life is one of twenty works produced by contemporary artists for the Cubitt Print Box in 2000. Cubitt is an artist-run gallery and studio complex in north London. In 2001 the complex moved from King’s Cross to Islington and the prints were commissioned as part of a drive to raise funds to help finance the move, and to support future exhibitions and events at the new gallery space. All the artists who contributed to the project had previously taken part in Cubitt’s programme. The portfolio was produced in an edition of 100 with twenty artists’ proofs; Tate’s copy is number sixty-six in the series.

Home

1999, Mona Hatoum

Home consists of a long table covered with gleaming metal kitchen appliances. The table has a polished wooden top and heavy metal legs on wheels. The industrial connotations of the table are offset by the domestic kitchen utensils on its surface, including graters, scissors, a colander, a whisk, a ladle, salad servers, a sieve, a pasta maker, presses and a heart-shaped pastry cutter. Wires snake through the installation, connected to each utensil with crocodile clips. The wires conduct electrical currents to the objects periodically illuminating small light bulbs positioned beneath the sieve and colander and inside an upright grater. The current is controlled by a software programme that alters the frequency and intensity of the lights. Speakers amplify the crackling sound of electricity coursing through the wires and the metal objects. The sculpture is set back behind a barrier of thin horizontal steel wires that separates the viewer from the potentially lethal current.

Memory

2012, Daido Moriyama

Untitled

1992–3, Zahoor ul Akhlaq

This is one of five small paintings on board in Tate’s collection by the Pakistani artist Zahoor ul Akhlaq (see Tate T14308–T14312). Dating from 1992–3, they are from a sequence of works based on the format of the takhti, a small wooden slate still used in Pakistan in rural or traditional schools for children to write on, wipe clean and reuse. Two of the five paintings – this one and Untitled (Tate T14308) – are from a series made in the early 1990s entitled Still Still Life. All five paintings were created during a period in Akhlaq’s career when he travelled extensively: having spent time at Yale University in the United States on a Fulbright Fellowship (1987–9), he taught at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey (1992–3) before moving to Toronto, Canada from 1993–7. Due in part to the lack of a permanent studio, he used acrylic rather than oil paint and often worked on a small scale.

Baroda

1992, Jyoti Bhatt

This is one of a group of black and white photographs in Tate’s collection by the Indian printmaker, painter and photographer Jyoti Bhatt (see Tate P14296–P14300 and P81231–P81235). They trace Bhatt’s photographic practice from an early stage and represent the development of a style which combined keen observation with inventive formal experimentation. From 1950 to 1959 Bhatt trained as a painter and muralist at the Faculty of Fine Arts at Maharaja Sayajirao University (MSU) in Baroda (now Vadodara) in Gujarat – a major centre for modern and contemporary artistic practice in India. In 1956 he saw the seminal exhibition of photography Family of Man, toured by the Museum of Modern Art, New York and curated by photographer Edward Steichen (1879–1973), in Ahmedabad and began to experiment with photography himself the next year. Throughout his career, and alongside an extensive practice as a printmaker and painter, Bhatt sustained his engagement with both the formal and material aspects of photography, which he learned through experimenting with technique and compositional elements. His early images, such as Feroz Katpitia as Salvador Dalí, Baroda c.1959 (Tate P81232), relate to the modernist Bauhaus experiments of László Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946) and led to the development of his mature style which featured double exposures and diptychs involving portraiture, nature and abstract subjects.

No. 6: Cutlery

1989, Helen Chadwick

This is one of a series of eight individually titled large-scale polaroid photographs from Helen Chadwick’s series Meat Abstracts 1989 (Tate P15568–P15575). In the late 1980s Chadwick’s work started to move away from traditional forms of self-representation. She stopped using her own, gendered body and started to work with meat and various forms of flesh, aiming towards a more universal image. Speaking of this development regarding her subject matter, she said: ‘I felt compelled to use materials that were still bodily, that were still a kind of self-portrait, but did not rely on the representation of my own body.’ (Quoted in Cocker 1996, p.23.)

Relics in the Pillow of Dreams

1985, Veronica Ryan OBE

The pillow of Ryan’s Relics in the Pillow of Dreams supports a set of bronze, pod-like 'relics’. They sit in its indentations, seemingly about to sprout from them. Both pillows and pods, as well as nuts, fruits and seeds, reappear throughout Ryan’s sculptures. These at times reference fruit from the Caribbean island of Montserrat, where Ryan spent her childhood before moving to the UK. Here, the soft-seeming pillow is placed close to the earth, acting as a link through which time-past (through the bronze ‘relics’) and time-future (through the possibility of dreams) meet.

Gallery label, March 2022

Belshazzar’s Feast, the Writing on Your Wall

1983–4, Susan Hiller

This work was prompted by reports of apparitions appearing on television screens after broadcasting ended, before 24-hour transmission. According to Hiller, the people who experienced this were ‘using television in the way that people used to use their fires’ to ’get ideas, see shapes’ and stimulate ‘imagination, creativity, even prophecy’. The title refers to the biblical account of mysterious signs appearing on a wall.

Gallery label, May 2019

Still Life Ingredients

1976, Patrick Caulfield

Mti

1973, Betye Saar

Mti 1973 is a shrine-like sculpture just over a metre high made from various materials collected and assembled by American artist Betye Saar. Its base comprises four large palm fronds; these prop up a platform on which there are four candles and a wooden box, open at the front. A second wooden box rests on top of this. On this box rests an orb on which a skull-like mask has been placed, facing upwards. The two boxes contain several figures. The lower box houses a black-faced doll; the upper one houses three standing animal gods. The two boxes are painted on all three closed sides with several all-seeing eyes, crosses and palms. There are multiple other decorations over the sculpture including beaded bracelets, bones and animal figurines.

Precarios: A Journal of Objects for the Chilean Resistance

1973–4, Cecilia Vicuña

The Weathervane

1969, Hervé Télémaque

Still Life with Key

c.1965, Benode Behari Mukherjee

Still Life with Key c.1965 is a paper collage on card that features an array of coloured shapes including triangles, circles, squares, rhomboids and waves. These are laid over a central block of collaged newspaper, which features both advertisements and columns of text. At the top of the composition is a key shape formed from black and pink paper. All of the forms in the work are made from pieces of cut paper in bright hues that are pasted onto beige-coloured card.

The Long Table with Fruit : 1949

1949, Patrick Heron

The attention to colour in this early still life by Heron reflects his enthusiasm for the work of Bonnard and Matisse. He commented that 'throughout my early life I had this tremendous battle against the total English contempt for anything they could call decorative ¿ The perfectly ordered surface gives great pleasure. That pleasure used to be run away from by the English'. The ceramics depicted in this work were produced by the Leach pottery, where Heron worked during the Second World War.

Gallery label, August 2004

Sketch of three bottles and a mug

1956, Aubrey Williams

Still Life with Yellow Fungus

c.1936–9, Kathleen Gerrard

Still Life

1930–9, Shikanosuke Yagaki

Shikanosuke Yagaki was an active member of many of the amateur photography clubs flourishing in Japan in the 1930s, including the Sanwa Bank Photo Club, the Karashishi-kai Photo Group, and the Kyoto Leica Club and his work was widely exhibited. Despite a lack of professional training, Yagaki developed a sophisticated style which combined the influence of European modernism with typical Japanese subjects. His work shows a great understanding of the camera’s potential, playing with movement, perspective, light and shadow.

Gallery label, October 2016

Still Life with Very Fine Hatching

1933, Giorgio Morandi

From a very early stage, Morandi committed himself to still life subjects. He used a stock of bottles, jugs, tins and boxes that he kept in his studio and worked from over a period of almost fifty years. The way light objects press up against dark in Still Life with Very Fine Hatching is emphasised by the close-up viewpoint. All distractions are excluded. The everyday container becomes an object of contemplation, a vessel for the viewer's own imagination.

Gallery label, August 2004

Still Life

1916, Diego Rivera

The objects depicted in this painting include a flask, a wine glass, a soda dispenser, a book and a tin of milk on a table. He also included his signature and the date of the painting on the milk label (‘DR/anno 16’). Rivera applied paint in different ways to create a variety of textures in the work. As a young painter in Paris, Rivera embraced cubism, a way of showing different viewpoints in a single painting. In the 1920s, he would go on make large mural paintings. He said he had not abandoned cubism but was ‘following the natural evolution’ of the style.

Gallery label, September 2019

Still Life on Corner of a Mantelpiece

1914, Vanessa Bell

Vanessa Bell was a central figure of the Bloomsbury group, a group of artists, writers and intellectuals, formed in 1905. This mantelpiece was in Vanessa Bell’s house at 46 Gordon Square in London, where the group would often meet. The objects on it include handmade paper flowers from the Omega Workshops, a design company founded by Roger Fry, a member of the group. Bell’s use of an unconventional low viewpoint, fractured, abstracted forms and bright colours show her exploring techniques associated with Fauvism and Cubism.

Gallery label, March 2018

Still Life with a Volume of Wither’s ‘Emblemes’

1696, Edward Collier

In this still-life painting the musical instruments, wine and jewels represent the fleeting pleasures of life, while the skull and hour-glass symbolise the inevitability of death. The open book shows a brief poem emphasising the theme of mortality. The Latin inscription in the top left corner comes from the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes: ‘Vanity of vanities, all is vanity’. This is why such pictures are known as vanitas paintings. Born in the Netherlands, Collier arrived in England in 1693 to produce still-life paintings like this to sell to the English market. He died in London in 1708.

Gallery label, February 2016