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 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

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

Conversation

c.1960, Benode Behari Mukherjee

Conversation c.1960 depicts two figures seated on stools, their bodies facing in opposite directions. The figure on the left has its torso and head turned to face the other person, suggesting the movement of twisting around while engaged in conversation. The figures are formed from pieces of cut paper in bold, bright colours that include orange, red, green, dark blue and black. These are pasted onto beige-coloured card to form the scene.

Fête

1989, Bridget Riley

Fête is a screenprint featuring a highly colourful, abstract composition within a white border. The composition comprises twenty vertical bands each separated into numerous coloured sections. These sections vary in length and form parallelograms of different sizes. While the longer coloured parallelograms primarily look vertical in orientation, the smallest ones appear to cut diagonally across the upright bands. Where these latter shapes run into each other across adjacent columns and are identical in colour they also appear to form longer diagonal strips running in front of the vertical columns. The work features a wide range of even, unmodulated colours, with no discernible pattern to their organisation. The print is signed and dated in its bottom-right corner and at the bottom-left are written the title and the numbers ‘21 / 60’, which indicate that this print is number twenty-one in an edition of sixty.

Ambiguous Structure No.92

1969, Jean-Pierre Yvaral

Soto left Venezuela for Paris in 1950 where, influenced by Piet Mondrian’s late works, he set out to make paintings that appeared to move. His interest in the transformation of matter into energy led him to create a series of reliefs he called vibrations. In these works, layers of lines, either static or mobile, produce an optical disturbance. In Cardinal a cascade of stems hangs in front of a striped background, gently swinging with the air around it. This movement is enhanced by the optical effects of the rods against the hand-drawn lines.

Gallery label, October 2016

Rang Baranga

1969, Rasheed Araeen

Rang Baranga is made from an intersecting lattice structure composed of eight individual columns, each painted in a sequence of contrasting colours. The title is an Urdu term meaning ‘of many colours’. Trained as a civil engineer in Karachi, Pakistan, Rasheed Araeen creates sculptures that reference architectural and engineering structures as well as modernist art. In his search for stable yet open configurations, he found inspiration in nature, particularly in the movement of fire and water. Araeen was also struck by the sculptural language of Anthony Caro (displayed in this room), whose work he encountered after moving to London in 1964.

Gallery label, August 2024

Fold 2

1988, Samia Halaby

Vivid, brightly coloured geometric shapes and slanting lines fill this screen, shifting restlessly in all directions. Halaby calls these moving abstract animations ‘kinetic paintings’. They exist in motion, as dynamic forms that change over time. Halaby created Fold 2 after teaching herself how to code on a Commodore Amiga 1000. Released in 1985, it was one of the first widely available personal computers. For Halaby, who also paints with brushes and canvas, ’The computer gave new attributes to the language of painting, and I want to be an artist at the edge of its investigation.’

Gallery label, February 2025

Staircase-III

2010, Do Ho Suh

untitled (to Don Judd, colorist) 1-5

1987, Dan Flavin

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

Untitled I

1970/2017, Nalini Malani

Untitled I is one of three works in Tate’s collection from a series of black and white photograms by the Indian artist Nalini Malani (see also Untitled II [Tate P82089] and Untitled III [Tate P82090]). The three images all date from 1970 and are visually similar in nature: monochromatic geometric studies in light and form. Originally produced as photograms, exposing light-sensitive paper to light without the use of a camera, these works now exist as photographic prints in an edition of ten. Tate’s copies were printed in 2017 and are number four in the edition. The photograms were first exhibited at the Pundole Art Gallery, Bombay in 1970, printed to a similar scale as the later edition.