Untitled

2020, Ed Atkins

This work in ink on board exemplifies Ed Atkins’s distinctive approach to painting. Made during the 2020 Covid-19 lockdown, Untitled 2020 is one of a series of mattress and pillow paintings depicted in a realistic, almost photographic way (see also Untitled 2020, Tate T15779). Seen from above, Untitled 2020 is a medium-size painting of a white ruffled mattress protector which has recently been slept on. Its smaller companion painting, Untitled 2020, shows a crumpled white pillow, still bearing the indent from the sleeper’s head. Atkins uses a concentrated language of paint, form, space and volume to indicate the weight or imprint of the body. While such paintings conjure up absent bodies, they also suggest a sense of vacancy that connects to Atkins’s long-term interest in the work of the Irish playwright Samuel Beckett.

Icon for summoning memory

2022, Alberta Whittle

Icon for Summoning Memory is a wall-mounted work that sits between painting, sculpture and tapestry. It takes the form of a square linen canvas depicting a figure viewed from the side, whose body, clothed in a raffia dress, reaches below the rest of the composition and touches the floor. The background is composed of acrylic paint, oil pastel, synthetic hair, doilies, wool, beads and cowrie shells, as well as patches of fabric that belonged to the artist’s grandmother. These various mediums are layered onto the canvas to provide a complex patterned background for the figure, whose face and hands are constructed of tufted wool, while a halo of doilies surrounds their head, and their body is shrouded in layers of cascading raffia.

Queens and Kings

2017, Zohra Opoku

Queens and Kings continues Opoku’s series WHO IS WEARING MY T-SHIRT, exploring the impact of textile waste in Ghana. Screenprinted onto a patchwork of used fabrics, the composition includes the artist and her siblings standing around piles of garments. With leaves and branches disguising their faces, the figures wear second-hand T-shirts and kente cloth passed down by their father, Asante Chief Nana Opoku Guyabaah II of Asato, Volta Region. Kente cloth is a handwoven fabric made from silk and cotton. It was originally produced to dress kings and their courts and is often worn on special occasions. Opoku’s work explores ‘how various types of dress culture are inspired by different social influences’. Through her fabric combinations, she invites us to consider the ways tradition and globalisation intersect in contemporary Ghana.

Gallery label, June 2023

The Constant Search for Self

2013, Virginia Chihota

The Constant Search for Self 2013 is an uneditioned monoprint on paper that depicts five rounded, sac-like forms arranged around a horizontal oval shape against a background of translucent blocks of grey-blue and stone colour. Each of the five ‘sacs’ contains at least one mask-like face notable for its hatched striations – an important aspect of the artist’s evocation of texture in her printmaking technique. The same face is repeated in two of the sacs. Each face is obscured to varying degrees: one in the top centre of the sheet is almost entirely concealed by a grey wash; the others by repetitions of lines and loops in a blood-red hue. The overall shape itself bears strong allusions to fertility: the placement of the human figure within deep red sacs makes them appear womb-like, while the arrangement of circular forms clearly resembles the head of a flower – its reproductive organ.

Grand Boules

2009, Sheila Hicks

Grand Boules 2009 is a textile sculpture comprising eight large ‘boules’, or ball-like forms, which are arranged either directly on the floor or on a low plinth. Each individual element measures roughly one metre in diameter and together they can be placed in varying configurations or piles. Like her earlier wall-hung weavings of the late 1950s and 1960s, known as the Minimes (see Tate T14126–T14128, T14171), the Boules are a key motif in Hicks’s work and a form to which she has repeatedly returned. The core of each boule is often formed from garments that have previously belonged to the artist’s friends or family, and as such they hold memories for Hicks, who refers to them as her memory balls. Layers of multi-coloured and multi-textured twine and fibre are wrapped around and around the central forms, building them up into tightly wound bundles. Grand Boules is the largest work in the series of Boules. Related works include Palitos con Bolas 2011 (included in Hick’s solo exhibition Lifelines at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris in 2018) and Au-delà, which she installed on a large wall within the foyer of the Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 2017–18. The Grand Boules were exhibited in Hicks’s solo exhibition at Alison Jacques Gallery, London in 2017.

Jauba

2000, Mrinalini Mukherjee

Jauba (Hibiscus) 2000 is a freestanding sculpture that was created by knotting yarn made from dyed hemp fibre over a vertical metal armature, with the bulk of its woven detail on the front. The yarn has been dyed red, green and black and is woven into pleated organic forms which drape the frame like a robe. ‘Jauba’ means hibiscus in the artist’s native language Bengali. Visually, the sculpture resembles a botanical, floral form, roughly symmetrical, which droops slightly towards the floor due to the weight of the material.

Landscape of Longing

1997–9, Saleem Arif Quadri

Landscape of Longing refers to Arif Quadri’s interest in spiritual quests and journeys. It evokes a map seen from above. Arif Quadri describes the work as ‘a celebration of life with all its inexplicable mysteries’. He relates the painted forms to the sinuous strokes of Islamic calligraphy. The shapes between and around each form are important to the artist. They suggest figurative elements such as female and male figures, or pods and birds. Arif Quadri is influenced by texts ranging from Sufi writings to work by Dante, the 13th century Italian poet.

Gallery label, June 2021

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

May Heaven Preserve You From Dangers and Assassins

2010, Mark Bradford

May Heaven Preserve You from Dangers and Assassins is a large, mural-sized canvas with the remains of advertising flyers collaged across its surface. It is one of a number of works made by the artist since 2009, characterised by a palette of black, white, silver and grey tones, which feature what he calls ‘merchant posters’ (there is no official name for these often hand drawn notices). These advertising flyers are taken from Bradford’s neighbourhood in Los Angeles, where they are typically affixed to the hoardings surrounding abandoned and derelict buildings. May Heaven Preserve You from Dangers and Assassins specifically features flyers selling pest control services (the word ‘BUGS is repeated across the central portion of the canvas). Like others in this body of work, such as When It Stops Snowing, which is made from advertisements that sell the facility to ‘receive calls on your cell phone from jail’, the work carries an underlying statement about the social circumstances of the target audience for these ads. Bradford is interested in the manner in which the changing notices indicate the altered circumstances that the local population experiences, and the way in which the urban fabric can be ‘read’ through this layering of signs. Although these works have a surface similarity with the work of twentieth-century European ‘affichiste’ artists such as Raymond Hains (1926–2005) and Jacques Villeglé (born 1926, see for example Jazzmen 1961, Tate T07619), Bradford is less concerned with the proliferation of commercial imagery than with the socio-political clues that his materials contain.

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

Freedom and Change

1984, Lubaina Himid CBE RA

Lubaina Himid’s large installation is a celebration of relationships between women. Two Black women run barefoot along a beach, holding their hands high in the air as if about to twirl joyfully. Appearing to trample two white men trapped in the sand, they run towards the future, holding the leads of a pack of snarling dogs. Himid wrote about this work: ‘Made on a “theatre curtain”, it precedes the drama and romance of running away ... without depicting the reality of running away or the consciousness of a sudden departure on those left behind.’

Gallery label, August 2020

Ink Splash II

2012, El Anatsui

Ink Splash II resembles an abstract painting. However the illusion of swift, gestural brushstrokes and splashes has been created through a painstaking process of weaving flattened bottle tops together with copper wire. The artist explains, ‘the most important thing is the transformation. The fact that these media, each identifying a brand of drink, are no longer going back to serve the same role but are elements that could generate some reflection, some thinking, or just some wonder…[T]hey are removed from their accustomed, functional context into a new one, and they bring along their histories and identities.’

Gallery label, January 2016

Quipu Womb (The Story of the Red Thread, Athens)

2017, Cecilia Vicuña

Vicuña calls Quipu Womb a ‘poem in space.’ Over 50 large strands of unspun wool, dyed red, flow down from a metal ring high above our heads. Each cord has different knots spaced rhythmically along its length. The work references menstrual blood as well as the energies, flows and cycles of nature. Vicuña draws from Indigenous weaving practices, ritual, and environmental activism. Many of these works include explorations of the quipu. This is an ancient system of knotting rope used by Inca and Andean cultures, thought to be an alternative to written language. The artist says this ‘must have been a female invention.’

Gallery label, February 2022

More Blancmange

1988, Eric Bainbridge

More Blancmange 1988 is a large sculpture by Eric Bainbridge comprised of six enlarged spoons standing lined up in a shallow box. The work is made of fibreglass, plywood and plaster covered with white artificial fur fabric. It is displayed on the floor, leaning against the gallery wall. The title of the work refers to the dessert blancmange, traditionally made of milk or cream and therefore often appearing white in colour, which became associated with middle and working class cuisine in post-war England. The addition of ‘more’ suggests an excess of this often sickly food, relating to the large scale of these otherwise everyday objects.

St John

1988, Gerhard Richter

St John belongs to a series called the ‘London Paintings’, each named after one of the chapels of Westminster Abbey. The titles are not meant to be descriptive, but refer merely to associations connected with the artist’s visits to London. Since 1980 Richter has made his abstract paintings by manipulating spatulas of different lengths, loaded with paint, across areas of the canvas. New layers of colour cover earlier ones. Richter’s inability to control the precise distribution of paint allows a degree of chance to determine the paintings’ final appearance.

Gallery label, April 2007

Something Old Something New

1974, Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian

Oneness of Concrete

1971, Jiro Takamatsu

This work belongs to Takamatsu’s Oneness series. In these works, he explores the complex nature of everyday materials. For each Oneness piece, he would select a single material and then manipulate it. By doing this, he demonstrated its transformative potential as well as its unique quality. For the artist, this process was a means to achieve a ‘more total relation’ with a particular substance. The series can be read as Takamatsu’s comment on the rapid industrialisation in Japan after the end of the Second World War. During this time, traditional relationships to the natural world were overtaken by the development of consumer culture.

Gallery label, December 2020

White Painting

1969, Michael Buthe

It might look like the artist has randomly slashed this canvas. In fact, Buthe carefully composed it. He wanted to create a powerful relationship between the grid of the stretcher and the loose fabric. He used various processes to create this effect. This includes stitching lengths of cloth together and folding, tying, and wrapping sections around and underneath the stretcher bars. This draws attention to the space in front, inside and behind the stretcher. Buthe also painted the wooden stretcher bars white to match the fabric. This helps them be seen as parts of the same idea.

Gallery label, August 2020

Shooting Picture

1961, Niki de Saint Phalle

To make her Shooting Pictures, Saint Phalle filled polythene bags with paint and enclosed them within layers of plaster and chicken wire that created a textured white surface. She invited spectators to shoot at these constructions, releasing the paint. Saint Phalle considered these shootings to be performances, or ‘happenings’, which she saw as integral parts of the work just as much as the finished product. This one was shot by North American artists Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. Saint Phalle stopped making these works in 1970, explaining ‘I had become addicted to shooting, like one becomes addicted to a drug’.

Gallery label, February 2024

Head of E.O.W. I

1960, Frank Auerbach

This is a head study of Stella West ('E.O.W'), Auerbach's principal model from the early 1950s until 1963. A related work, 'Head of E.O.W V, is also on display here. Both paintings belong to a series of life size frontal heads on which Auerbach worked between late 1960 and summer 1961. The paint is built up and has an almost sculptural quality. This is the result of repeated overpainting of previous images on the same board, and is an extreme example of Auerbach's endeavour to convey a sense of his accumulated experience of the model.

Gallery label, September 2004

Distillation

1957, Gillian Ayres CBE RA

Gillian Ayres applied her paints with rags and brushes, and by pouring from the can and squirting from the tube. Influenced by photographs of the US painter Jackson Pollock making his drip paintings, she worked on this painting while it was flat on the floor. Ayres kept the paint fluid by blending it with turpentine, allowing her to manipulate it rapidly and spontaneously. She was interested in 'the idea of no composition’, balancing shape and colour without hierarchy ‘so that nothing is more important than anything else'.

Gallery label, January 2025

Black Wall

1959, Louise Nevelson

In the late 1950s, Nevelson began to make reliefs by stacking wooden boxes and crates, each of which would contain an arrangement of found objects that she collected as she walked around the streets of New York City. Black Wall is an early example of this approach, filled with pieces of scrap timber, such as joinery offcuts and fragments of furniture. The disparate elements are unified by being painted black, a colour which Nevelson suggested will make any material look more distinguished.

Gallery label, January 2016

Untitled No. 8 (Shattered Glass)

1959, Nigel Henderson

Henderson moved to East London just after the Second World War. The area had suffered severe wartime damage. Untitled No. 8 (Shattered Glass) features shards of photographs of this bomb-blasted environment. Henderson has overpainted these in black to reinforce the impression of a scarred and fragmented urban space.

Gallery label, December 2019

The Entire City

1934, Max Ernst

A crumbling city looms oppressively below the ring-shaped moon. Ernst made a whole series of such works. The imagery may reflect his pessimism as Nazism took hold in his native Germany. The ruined cityscape was created using a technique that Ernst called ‘grattage’ (scraping). It involved placing the canvas over planks of wood or other textured surfaces, then scraping paint across it. The shapes that emerged formed the basis of the image. Grattage was one of a number of techniques that Surrealist artists explored as a way of letting a chance element into their work.

Gallery label, January 2022

Picture of Spatial Growths - Picture with Two Small Dogs

1920–39, Kurt Schwitters

Schwitters started this assemblage of discarded rubbish and printed ephemera in Germany in 1920. Seventeen years later he brought it with him to Norway, having escaped from Nazi Germany. There he added Norwegian material: theatre tickets, receipts, newspaper cuttings, scraps of lace, and a box with two china dogs. The different layers of collage reflect the artist’s journey into exile.

Gallery label, January 2016

Bottle of Vieux Marc, Glass, Guitar and Newspaper

1913, Pablo Picasso

Picasso first began to make collages in 1912. The use of cut papers, and in particular clippings from newspapers, seemed a natural extension of his earlier experiments with stencilled lettering. Whereas his earlier cubist works had involved deconstructing objects into their component parts, works like this one sought to construct a unified composition from abstracted fragments of the objects depicted. The newspaper in this work may have been chosen for its faded colour, since it was already nearly thirty years old when Picasso used it.

Gallery label, January 2016

Angel of Anarchy

1936–40, Eileen Agar

The blindfolded Angel of Anarchy is loosely based on an earlier painted plaster head. Agar stated that with this new work she wanted to create something ‘totally different, more astonishing, powerful ... more malign’. It suggests the foreboding and uncertainty that she felt about the future in the late 1930s. Believing that women are the true surrealists, Agar wrote: ‘the importance of the unconscious in all forms of Literature and Art establishes the dominance of a feminine type of imagination over the classical and more masculine order.’

Gallery label, October 2016