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Back to In the Studio

Henri Matisse, The Snail 1953. Tate.

Painterly Gestures

12 rooms in In the Studio

  • Belkis Ayón and Sandra Vásquez de la Horra
  • Studio Practice
  • ARTIST ROOMS: Francesca Woodman
  • International Surrealism
  • The Disappearing Figure: Art after Catastrophe
  • The Shape of Words
  • Joan Mitchell
  • Mark Rothko
  • Gerhard Richter
  • Painterly Gestures
  • Infinite Geometry
  • In the Conservation Studio: Andy Warhol

Artists in this room demonstrate different ways they approach painting as an action, emphasising the processes and materials they use in their work

The rise of abstraction in 20th-century art opened up new possibilities for painters. They could now convey meaning without having to depict recognisable figures, actions or emotions. Instead they could express themselves freely through brushstrokes or colour alone. Some articulated their inner mental states through the gestures they used to apply paint onto the canvas. Others experimented with materials, giving depth and texture to the surface of their paintings. The years following the Second World War saw a particular growth in these forms of abstraction across the globe, with movements spanning from abstract expressionism in North America to the avant-garde group Gutai in Japan.

In response to these art movements, artists began to produce works that reflected or parodied the earlier artists’ dramatic physical actions and gestures. Niki de Saint Phalle took expressive action to a violent extreme by using a rifle to puncture bags of coloured paint that dripped down the surface of her Shooting Pictures. Other painters’ actions were more conceptual or meditative. Joan Snyder covered her ‘Stroke Paintings’ in arrays of different types of brush marks, like classification charts or exercises. In his From Line paintings, Lee Ufan gave a visual form to the duration of a brushstroke, painting repeated straight lines until he used up the pigment on his brush.

Over time, many painters have also confronted the spread of image-making technologies and what they mean for traditional art forms. To create her recent paintings, Jacqueline Humphries combines analogue and digital techniques. She makes works that show her hybrid creative process through overlapping layers and surfaces that vibrate and shimmer like video screens.

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Tate Modern
Natalie Bell Building Level 2 East
Room 12

Getting Here

Ongoing

Free

Joan Snyder, Dark Strokes Hope  1971

Between 1969 and 1972 Snyder created a series of ‘Stroke Paintings’. These feature arrays of distinct brushstrokes of various kinds and colours, in this work also including a handprint. ‘I was interested in process and I wanted to show the raw canvas... the gesso... the first layer of paint. I wanted to be able to see all those things in one painting... the anatomy of that painting, of how it evolved.’ Synder’s approach challenges us to look at painting at a slower pace, to follow the sequence of her strokes like a narrative text or a piece of music.

Gallery label, February 2024

1/5
artworks in Painterly Gestures

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Henri Matisse, The Snail  1953

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

2/5
artworks in Painterly Gestures

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Jacqueline Humphries, ~?j.h%  2018

This work derives from a photograph Humphries scanned of one of her earlier paintings and turned into digital code using seven characters: ~, ?, j, J, H, h and %. She then made this code into a stencil, produced from a laser-cut sheet of rubber, which she used to create ~?j.h%. She applied a layer of black oil paint through the stencil, then a layer of red, moving the stencil between applications. She painted over these rows of computer-generated characters in long diagonal brushstrokes and areas of thick white paint. The result is a mix of mechanical translations and direct physical gestures.

Gallery label, February 2024

3/5
artworks in Painterly Gestures

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Niki de Saint Phalle, Shooting Picture  1961

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

4/5
artworks in Painterly Gestures

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Lee Ufan, From Line  1978

This work belongs to a series that Lee made by tracing long lines until he used up the paint on the brush. He laid the canvas horizontally and carefully controlled his breathing during each of these slow markmaking gestures. Describing his method, Lee wrote: ‘Load the brush and draw a line. At the beginning it will appear dark and thick, then it will get gradually thinner and finally disappear ... A line must have a beginning and an end. Space appears within the passage of time, and when the process of creating space comes to an end, time also vanishes.’

Gallery label, February 2024

5/5
artworks in Painterly Gestures

More on this artwork

Art in this room

L04360: Dark Strokes Hope
Joan Snyder Dark Strokes Hope 1971
T00540: The Snail
Henri Matisse The Snail 1953
T15323: ~?j.h%
Jacqueline Humphries ~?j.h% 2018
T03824: Shooting Picture
Niki de Saint Phalle Shooting Picture 1961
T07301: From Line
Lee Ufan From Line 1978
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