Displaying items by tag: Tate

Tate and the Terra Foundation for American Art announced the appointment of Alex J. Taylor as Tate's new Terra Foundation Research Fellow in American Art.

"Research plays a fundamental role in Tate’s mission to increase the public’s knowledge, enjoyment, and understanding of the art it collects," explained Tate’s Head of Collection Research. "This new initiative promises to forge new perspectives on post-war American art and deepen the rich interpretative information that Tate makes available to the public on works in the collection."

Sculpture is to take centre stage at the Tate galleries next year, with the first major retrospective in 20 years of Alexander Calder – credited with inventing the mobile – and a showcase of Barbara Hepworth's carvings and bronzes among the highlights of Tate's 2015 programme.

Other exhibitions include Jackson Pollock, South African painter Marlene Dumas and a look at pop art's international influences.

Alexander Calder: Performing Sculpture at Tate Modern will trace the works of the groundbreaking US-born sculptor, born in 1898, from his early years entertaining the bohemians of inter-war Paris with works such as Calder's Circus.

London’s Courtauld Gallery will put its entire collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings online as part of the Your Paintings project. The goal of the ten-year endeavor is to put the UK’s public collection of oil, acrylic and tempera paintings online. The UK is the first country in the world to give such access to its national collection of paintings. So far, 3,217 venues in the UK including the Tate and the National Gallery have participated in the project and 212,000 paintings can be accessed through the Your Paintings website.

The Your Paintings project is the result of a collaboration between the Public Catalogue Foundation (PCF) and the BBC. The PCF started making a photographic record of the nation’s oil paintings in 2003 while the Your Paintings website, built by the BBC, was launched with 63,000 paintings in June 2011. Typically, 80% of these paintings are not on view and a vast majority has never been photographed before.

The images and accompanying information about the works may be reproduced for non-commercial research and scholarly purposes.

On Tuesday, December 10, both Sotheby’s and Christie’s announced that they have hired new Chief Marketing Officers. Sotheby’s is bringing former MasterCard CMO Alfredo Gangotena on board, while Christie’s has hired Marc Sands, the Tate’s Director of Media and Audiences.

Bruno Vinciguerra, Sotheby’s Chief Operating Officer, released a statement saying that Gangotena “will be responsible for shaping and delivering Sotheby’s brand message globally -- what we say through digital, advertising, catalogues, the press and philanthropy.”

Sands, who will begin at Christie’s in 2014, is taking over a position that has not been filled since 2011.

Over fifty major works totaling about $64 million were offered as payment to the UK for nearly $40 million worth of inheritance tax that accumulated between 2010 and 2012. Those in control of the estates of authors, artists, and collectors have been allowed to use cultural and historical artifacts to pay the tax since 1910.

The UK has recently received a number of masterpieces including two oil portraits of aristocratic families by Sir Joshua Reynolds, a renowned 18^th century English artist. One portrait will be placed in the Tate and the other will go to the Bristol Museum and Art Gallery. Other works include two landscapes by JMW Turner; an oil sketch by Peter Paul Rubens titled The Triumph of Venus that will be placed in Cambridge’s Fitzwilliam Museum; a work by Italian 17^th century master Guernico that has been allocated to the National Gallery; and four sculptures and three works on paper by Barbara Hepworth.

The ability to donate significant works to pay off inheritance tax has introduced a number of remarkable pieces to the UK’s galleries and museums, bringing monumental works out from behind closed doors and into the public arena.

Although major figures in the British art world including Tate director Nicholas Serota, filmmaker Danny Boyle, and artist Jeremy Deller have voiced their opposition, the council of the Borough of Tower Hamlets in London’s East End decided on Wednesday to sell Henry Moore’s Draped Seated Woman. In addition to the big name opponents, more than 1,500 signed a petition against the sale in just a few days.

Completed in 1957, Moore sold the bronze sculpture to the London County Council in 1960 for a fraction of its worth. When the sale was made, Moore and the now defunct London Council agreed that the statue would be on view permanently near a housing project. When the project was leveled in the late 1990s, Draped Seated Woman was moved to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park.

Lutfur Rahman, the mayor of the Tower Hamlets, blamed the government’s severe budget cuts for leaving him with little choice in the matter. The sculpture is expected to bring in about $32 million when it goes to auction in early 2013.

A conversation with my friend Barry Flanagan could be a baffling affair. Stiffly whispering one minute, barking jokes the next, he delighted in wordplay and biographical confidences easily lost on the listener.

Sometimes in mid-flow, the sculptor paused. Then he leant forward and sniffed the air, with his chiselled features and unruly greying hair, the image of the animal he had made his trademark – the hare.

In 1979, inspired by one of these creatures glimpsed on the Sussex Downs, he bought a dead one from a local butcher and modelled it at his East End foundry. His leaping hare was instantly iconic. Bordeaux wine producers and Japanese hoteliers queued up to buy one. He represented Britain at the Venice Biennale in 1982. Showered with fame and money, he was a trailblazer for commercially canny artist-stars such as Hirst and Emin.

Yet the mercurial hare, also a motif in the work of such key influences as Miró and Joseph Beuys, had pedigree in the out-there territory that Flanagan first explored in the 1960s and 70s when he was an adventurer on the furthest shores of conceptual art. But far from being a departure, the hare was an integral feature on the journey Flanagan first set out on.

Born in Prestatyn, north Wales, in 1941, Flanagan resolved at the outset of his career to embrace every direction, and poetry not sculpture was his first track. In 1964-65, with others at St Martin's art college, he produced the magazine Silâns. His writings display a gift as formidable as that he applied to stone and marble: prose and concrete poetry full of subversive, offbeat humour. Such poetry spilled over into his sculpture, inspiring titles such as aaing j gni aa.

As a sculptor, Flanagan rejected the stark metal structures of "girder-welders" like his tutor Antony Caro and reverently stuck with non-traditional materials like rope and sand. He flirted with Land Art and Arte Povera. He made and filmed a hole in the sea off the Dutch coast. He worked with Yoko Ono. With some students at St Martin's and John Latham, their tutor, he took a chunk of Clement Greenberg's Art and Culture and chewed it for a work called Still and Chew. Greenberg, an American critic, also advocated Caro's formalist school. Flanagan and his contemporaries recoiled, preferring a less shackled approach. When the college library wanted the book back, Latham returned the detritus distilled in a vial and was summarily sacked.

Family was paramount, and Flanagan brought up two daughters in Camden Town. He did casual labouring to supplement art's meagre returns, but he disliked the way "money punishes art" and resorted to making his own lino-printed currency. These Flanagan notes were issued in fives, tens and fifties and were redeemable against his estate. He used them to pay for labour and materials. Yet when real money came, he believed in unburdening himself of it as fast as possible. In 1971, he distributed the payment he received from the organisers of Art Spectrum London for his involvement in the new 50p decimal pieces at the show's opening at Alexandra Palace. A decade or so on, when the amounts he received were much larger, he continued to display mind-boggling generosity, passing on his prize money to a struggling young French sculptor, for example, or sponsoring a young woman after casually hearing her complain to her mother that she lacked the funds to do a teacher training course. For Flanagan, flow was the important thing, with money as much as anything else.

Even as workmen toil to complete the building, one thing is clear: the new gallery that White Cube is about to add to its empire is vast. When contemporary-art dealer Jay Jopling's latest venture opens on 12 October, at 5,400 sq metres, it will be the largest commercial art gallery in Britain: the Tate Modern of the for-profit art world.

White Cube Bermondsey – a stone's throw from Tate Modern and Renzo Piano's Shard building – will be Jopling's third outpost in London, adding a branch south of the river to galleries in the West End and Hackney. A fourth, in Hong Kong, is planned for early next year. What began in 1993 as one of the smallest galleries in London now employs more than 100 people.

The new gallery, converted from a 1970s warehouse once used as a distribution centre for the Radio Times, contains an array of new spaces for showing White Cube's roster of artists, who range from Damien Hirst and Gilbert and George to Anselm Kiefer and Doris Salcedo. The West End gallery has 464 sq metres to play with, the Hackney outpost 903 sq metres. Jopling's first gallery was just four sq metres.

The main "south galleries" in Bermondsey have the scale of of a respectable-size public museum and will, according to White Cube's director of exhibitions, Tim Marlow, provide the area for the main shows. But there are also three smaller galleries that will host one-off exhibitions by emerging artists not normally represented by White Cube, and a further, cube-shaped space measuring 9 x 9 x 9 metres.

"You should never keep things static," said Marlow. "The more interesting and the more varied spaces we can provide, the more excited artists get about working in them." He laughed off suggestions that such a hefty expansion could prove unsustainable. "It's definitely sustainable. London is a city where artists always want to be shown, to have representation. It is the equal of New York in terms of the art market. And we're not scrabbling around for shows. It's still going to be a struggle for our artists to have major exhibitions at White Cube more than once every three years."

Its current expansion presents an intriguing commentary on the vagaries of the art market. While smaller galleries, and those outside London, have suffered in the recession, with Glasgow's Sorcha Dallas the latest to bite the dust, White Cube appears to have withstood the downturn. Marlow says: "At the top end, the art market is a global market, and we have therefore been less affected than other people. It's also the case that when economic conditions are the toughest it is sometimes good to think about expansion."

A naked youth had oil poured over him inside Tate Britain today in an artist-led demonstration against oil company BP Plc (BP/)’s sponsorship of Tate.

The performance marked the first anniversary of BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil-rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico, the U.S.’s worst-ever oil spill. BP is a longstanding sponsor of Tate Britain, the British Museum, the Royal Opera House and the National Portrait Gallery, and has said it will maintain those London sponsorships, which cost it a total of more than 1 million pounds ($1.6 million) a year.

Today’s action was staged by Liberate Tate, a group of 15 to 20 artists who want BP’s sponsorship of Tate to end. Shortly after Tate Britain’s 10 a.m. opening, about eight black-clad activists entered the building to perform the strip-in.

The young man “removed his clothes carefully and slowly, and handed it to two other people dressed in black,” said Nina Jones, a 27-year-old painter who took part in the protest. He was “curled in a fetal-like position.”

A man and a woman, “both with veils over their faces, arrived from the very back of the gallery carrying two green petrol cans with BP logos on them,” she recalled. “They started to slowly pour the oil over his body.”