© Isidora Bojovic
The six paintings in this room were conceived by Gerhard Richter as a coherent group, named after the American experimental composer John Cage
Since the early 1980s, Richter has frequently made abstract works by applying layers of paint, and then wiping a squeegee across the surface. As the upper layers of paint are dragged across the canvas, earlier moments from the painting’s creation are allowed to resurface.
The Cage paintings are the outcome of several layers of painting and erasure. Their surfaces are animated by lines where the squeegee has paused, by brushstrokes, other scrapings, and areas where the skin of oil paint has dried and rippled. The paint seems delicate and fluid in some areas, coarser and more solid in others.
Richter was listening to the music of John Cage while he worked on these paintings and titled them after the composer. There are no direct links between any particular work in this series and any piece of music by Cage. However, Richter has long been interested in Cage’s ideas about ambient sound and silence, as well as his controlled use of chance procedures in musical composition.
Tate Modern
Natalie Bell Building Level 2 East
Room 11
1 February 2022 – 5 October 2025
Free
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 Toor has described the work as a ‘queer self/family portrait in a conservative Islamic context’ (unpublished artist’s statement for Aicon Gallery, New York, October 2015).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 Gerhard Richter
Lisa Brice, Untitled (after Courbet, Balthus, Degas, Valadon & Matisse) 2023
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artworks in Gerhard Richter
Peter Doig, Untitled 2008
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Peter Doig, Untitled 2008
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artworks in Gerhard Richter
Peter Doig, Untitled 2008
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Peter Doig, Untitled 2008
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Peter Doig, Untitled 2008
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Antonio Obá, Sentinel - Kinda 2021
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artworks in Gerhard Richter
Peter Doig, Untitled 2008
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artworks in Gerhard Richter
Peter Doig, Untitled (Ping Pong) 2006–8
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artworks in Gerhard Richter
Peter Doig, Untitled 2008
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artworks in Gerhard Richter
Peter Doig, Untitled 2008
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artworks in Gerhard Richter
Peter Doig, Untitled 2008
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artworks in Gerhard Richter
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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