Antonio Obá, Sentinel - Kinda 2021. Lent by the Tate Americas Foundation, courtesy of the Latin American Acquisitions Committee, Estrellita B. Brodsky, and Tiqui Atencio Demirdjian 2024. © Courtesy of Antonio Obá and Mendes Wood DM São Paolo, Brussels, New York.
11 rooms in In the Studio
Explore contemporary paintings depicting people and figures
This room brings together contemporary artists who paint the figure in ways that respond to art history and to comment on society today. These paintings are all recent additions to Tate’s collection, and this is their first time on display.
From the 1970s onward, conceptual art, with its wide range of media and subject matter, seemed to triumph over paint on canvas. The artists in this room show how untrue this is. Using paint, they capture the complexity of everyday life and transform it. They tell emotionally charged stories or invent alternative realities, with meanings emerging as more than the sum of their visible parts.
In our current time dominated by screens and digital images, by choosing to paint, an artist asks us to think of the physicality of paint on canvas, the presence of the artist in their studio and our position as viewer standing in front of the work.
Many different histories emerge. Lisa Brice reclaims the female nude from a European tradition shaped largely by male artists, re-enacted here by women as active participants. Salman Toor says: ‘For me painting is a process of self-definition, as an outsider in multiple worlds which become more and more entangled and complex.’
Salman Toor, 9PM, the News 2015
Salman Toor’s large-scale oil painting 9pm, The News 2015 depicts a family sitting around the dining table following their evening meal. The scene focuses on the silent exchange between the two male protagonists, the patriarch, seated at the head of the table smoking a cigarette, and the son who sits in the nude, vulnerable to the external influences of the media, class and religion that have congregated behind him. A television screen showing the nine o’clock news, as the title indicates, looms over the son’s shoulder amidst comic-book style ‘flash’ signs, empty speech bubbles and splashes of black oil. The figure of the family’s disregarded servant and the towering minarets of a mosque dominate the background. The other members of the family sit oblivious to these invasions, including the female figure at the left of the scene, also presented nude perhaps to indicate her congruent vulnerability. Toor has described the work as a ‘queer self/family portrait in a conservative Islamic context’ (unpublished artist’s statement for Aicon Gallery, New York, October 2015). He has explained that he considers the anonymous figures in the background and to the right side of the scene as ‘ghosts’ of his native Pakistani culture: ‘I see these “ghosts” as agents of change and enablers of a reinvention of self and belonging. They are imagined ancestors and actors in a fractured, nonlinear history in which an imagined past is present now, a past that is both disruptor and enabler.’ (Quoted in artnet 2015, accessed 28 March 2018.)
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artworks in Painting the Figure in the 21st Century
Lisa Brice, Untitled (after Courbet, Balthus, Degas, Valadon & Matisse) 2023
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artworks in Painting the Figure in the 21st Century
Peter Doig, Untitled 2008
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artworks in Painting the Figure in the 21st Century
Peter Doig, Untitled 2008
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artworks in Painting the Figure in the 21st Century
Peter Doig, Untitled 2008
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artworks in Painting the Figure in the 21st Century
Peter Doig, Untitled 2008
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artworks in Painting the Figure in the 21st Century
Peter Doig, Untitled 2008
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artworks in Painting the Figure in the 21st Century
Antonio Obá, Sentinel - Kinda 2021
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artworks in Painting the Figure in the 21st Century
Peter Doig, Untitled 2008
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artworks in Painting the Figure in the 21st Century
Peter Doig, Untitled (Ping Pong) 2006–8
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artworks in Painting the Figure in the 21st Century
Peter Doig, Untitled 2008
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artworks in Painting the Figure in the 21st Century
Peter Doig, Untitled 2008
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artworks in Painting the Figure in the 21st Century
Peter Doig, Untitled 2008
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artworks in Painting the Figure in the 21st Century
Art in this room
Salman Toor
9PM, the News
2015
Lisa Brice
Untitled (after Courbet, Balthus, Degas, Valadon & Matisse)
2023
Peter Doig
Untitled
2008
Peter Doig
Untitled
2008
Peter Doig
Untitled
2008
Peter Doig
Untitled
2008
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