Tate

‘They react as we react. My machines are not washing machines or cars. They have a human quality, and they must change. They get nervous and must stop sometimes. If a machine stops, it doesn’t mean it’s broken. It’s just tired. The tragic or melancholic aspect of machines is very important to me. I don’t want them to run forever. It’s part of their life that they stop and faint.’ – Rebecca Horn

We are deeply saddened to hear that Rebecca Horn has died. The pioneering German artist’s iconic films and sculptures turn familiar materials, gestures and settings into emotionally charged scenes, with objects often taking on a life of their own.

In the late 1960s, Horn began to create wearable sculptures. She later used these ‘body extensions’ in staged actions performed for the camera. The isolation and restraint she felt while confined to bed due to illness inspired these works. She designed them to experiment with how the body moves, senses its surroundings and relates to other people. Her interest in out-of-the-ordinary movements led Horn to develop mechanical sculptures. With them she could explore actions beyond the limits of the human body and mimic animal behaviours.

🪭 Mechanical Body Fan, 1973–4 © Rebecca Horn (Images 1-5)
📷 Installation photography of Rebecca Horn 2009 display at The Tanks, Tate Modern showing: ✏️ Performances II, 1973 and 🎹 Concert for Anarchy, 1990 (Images 6-7)

‘I have constructed, not destroyed.’ - Lucio Fontana 💭 ✨

In 1959, Fontana began to cut the canvas, with dramatic perfection. These cuts (or tagli) were carefully pre-meditated but executed in an instant. Like the holes in some of his other canvases, they have the effect of drawing the viewer into space.

In some, however, the punctures erupt from the surface carrying the force of the gesture towards the viewer in a way that is at once energetic and threatening. Discover Fontana’s artwork up-close in our free Tate Modern display, Artist and Society: A view from São Paulo. https://bit.ly/3Xq5Ptw

✂️ Lucio Fontana, Spatial Concept ‘Waiting’, 1960 © Fondazione Lucio Fontana, Milan

‘I think of myself as a woman, an Igbo woman, a Nigerian, an African, a person of colour, an artist. The fascinating thing is that the layers I add to how I identify myself change over time. It just keeps broadening as I move farther out into the world’ - Njideka Akunyili Crosby 🎨
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​Akunyili Crosby was born in Nigeria, where she lived until the age of sixteen. In 1999 she moved to the United States, where she has remained since that time. Her cultural identity combines strong attachments to the country of her birth and to her adopted home, a hybrid identity that is reflected in her work.
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'Predecessors' is a diptych by the artist, completed in 2013. Made in acrylic, charcoal and pencil, two separate sheets of paper are displayed unframed and unmounted. The left-hand sheet features a single figure wearing a pink dress, seated in a domestic living-room environment. The subject is the artist’s alter ego, a modern African woman who embodies the nature of the African cosmopolitan lifestyle through her costume, style and mannerisms. She appears consistently in Akunyili Crosby’s works. On the right we see a kitchen with several utensils and kitchen tools which belong to different periods of Nigeria’s history. Completing the imagery in both parts of the work are family photographs and personal memorabilia, mixed with cut-outs from popular magazines and newspapers.

🎨 Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Predecessors, 2013. © Njideka Akunyili Crosby. Photo credit: Sylvain Deleu. Currently on loan Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts (Kaohsiung, Taiwan) in Capturing The Moment https://bit.ly/3XcZDot

From laden apple trees to yellowing leaves, autumn is often described as ‘the painter's season’ for its inspiration to generations of artists and writers.

Hope you feel inspired this week.

Ford Madox Brown, Carrying Corn 1854–5
Ivon Hitchens, Damp Autumn, 1941
Dame Ethel Walker, Seascape: Autumn Morning, c.1935
Thomas Gainsborough, Wooded Landscape c.1747
William Holman Hunt, Our English Coasts (‘Strayed Sheep’) 1852
Winifred Nicholson, The Hunter’s Moon 1955
Adrian Stokes, Autumn in the Mountains, 1903
Sir Alfred East, Golden Autumn c.1900

https://bit.ly/3Mz19we

Some colourful details for a grey day 🌈 🎨

The experimented with bold colours in their works. They were interested in colour theory, which drew links between physics, chemistry, psychology, philosophy and aesthetics. They believed that different colours could influence mood and emotion.

Don't miss your last chance to catch these vibrant works, on display in the exhibition at Tate Modern until 20 October. Book now: https://bit.ly/3I2N9J1

🐴 Wassily Kandinsky, Riding Couple, 1906-1907
🌷 Maria Franck-Marc, Girl with Toddler, circa 1913
🌺Marianne Werefkin, The Dancer Alexander Sacharoff, 1909
☂️ Auguste Macke, Promenade, 1913

Do you have a favourite thing to photograph? 📷 ⛰️

Marie-Louise Von Motesiczky’s mountain shots have us feeling inspired. ✨

📷 A mist covered mountain range in Lower Austria, July 1987
⛰️ A cloudy mountain range and field in Altaussee, Austria, 1988
⛰️ A rocky mountain face Altaussee, Austria, 1988
🏡 A mountain range in Majorca, 1988
⛰️ A mountain range at dusk in Altaussee, Austria, 1988
📷 A rocky mountain in Cascais, Portugal, 1994
📷 A mountain range in Austria, 1980
🏡 A field and mountain in Hagengut, Austria, 1984

🎞️ © Marie-Louise von Motesiczky Charitable Trust https://bit.ly/3TfZM9v

American-born artist Rita Keegan moved to England in the late 1970s. Drawing from her family archive dating back to the 1880s, Keegan creates striking monoprint collages, tearing up old photos and documents to form new imaginative compositions.

Here, Keegan employs images and fragments from this archive to create monoprint collages. The artist describes her practice as a response to ‘a feminist perspective' of 'putting yourself in the picture’.

In talking about her process, Keegan explains ‘I’ve always felt that to tear somebody’s face can be quite violent, but if you’re doing that to your own face, you’ve given yourself permission, so it’s no longer a violent act. It’s a deconstructive act. It’s a way of looking.’ https://bit.ly/3XaUIVa

Rita Keegan, Love, S*x and Romance 1984

How's your day sounding? 🎵

🎹 William Chase, The Keynote, 1915 https://t.co/tQRXdGoULn

Have you seen his artwork before? 👀

Joseph Wright, born on this day 1734, was a painter of portraits and subject-pictures who spent most of his life in his birth-place, Derby. From the mid 1760s he began to paint scenes of contemporary scientific and industrial life, of which 'An Iron Forge' (seen here) is one of the most striking.

The central figure of the picture is the iron-founder, presented in a commanding pose as he pauses in his work to cast a proud eye towards his wife and children. The workman, or 'finer', with his back to the viewer, holds the glowing metal over the anvil with a pair of tongs, ready to be hammered. The iron-founder's role as overseer and his relaxed attitude - even his faintly dandyish striped waistcoat - suggest that the introduction of new machinery in his forge has brought about a lightening of his workload.

Discover the painting up-close on free display at Tate Britain. 🏛️ https://bit.ly/47ecNGv

☀️ Good morning, September! ☀️

In 1976-7, British artist and Yorkshireman Peter Brook created a lithograph of each month of the year. Brought up in a farming family, the artist had a strong connection to the Yorkshire landscape. The resulting series shares Brook's muted and serene vision of the changing seasons, and the beauty within each. As well as being a celebrated artist in his lifetime, Brook was also an art teacher. He told his students: 'if you want a subject, look around you'. Nicknamed 'The Pennine Landscape Painter', Brook passed away in 2009, his life's work living on as a tribute to the British countryside he called home.

🐑 SEPTEMBER Cornfield - Sheep on the Wrong Side of the Gate
🛣️ OCTOBER Pennine Road
🍃 NOVEMBER Late Afternoon
❄️ DECEMBER Sheep Coming In
🏔️ JANUARY Pennine Valley
🐕‍🦺 FEBRUARY Fill-Dyke in Wigan
🌾 APRIL Showers
🛶 JUNE Canal
🎪 JULY After the Gala
🏠 AUGUST Cottage in Anglesey

Majesty 👑 🍃 One of the largest and oldest complete oak trees in England, which features in this 2006 artwork by Tacita Dean.

Dean created a series of 'Deformed Trees' by painting over old black and white postcards depicting trees, from a collection she had been acquiring from fleamarkets all over the world since the mid 1990s. The artist's methodology is a combination of idea-driven research with an openness to chance, accident, coincidence and poetic associations, which she allows to direct her processes.
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🖼️ Tacita Dean, Majesty 2006. https://bit.ly/42vTdTH

Ready for the beach?
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​​Swiss photographer René Burri (1933–2014) made numerous trips to Brazil during his lifetime, capturing Rio de Janeiro's iconic coastline and famous beaches. He loved to capture photographs from rooftops and balconies, finding symmetry and pattern in people and architecture. ​​In this colourful beach scene, the different designs of the sun umbrellas give the image rich colouration against the light beige of the sand, peppered with eye-popping patterns.
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​Burri’s use of both bird’s eye views and his attention to the effects of light and shadow are reminiscent of techniques used by modernist photographers in the early 20th century.
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Rio De Janeiro, Brazil 1967, printed 2014 © Estate of René Burri © DACS 2022.

https://shorturl.at/3fg3f

‘My context has been surrounded by forests, mountains and coastal experiences; the development of a ‘tropical’ way of thinking. In St Ives it is very special for me to experience the same ocean as Rio de Janeiro. Same water, different cultures, but in the end it is all about life.’ – Beatriz Milhazes 🌊

Last chance to catch Beatriz Milhazes: Maresias at Tate St Ives, an exhibition tracing the last four decades of Brazilian artist Milhazes's career. The artist's intensely colourful, large-scale abstract canvases adapt the concept of collage to painting.

🖼️ On display until 29 September. https://bit.ly/4bHpMkO

J.M.W. Turner painted the sea and the sky more than anything else in his lifetime. He travelled regularly with his sketchbook in hand, making sketches of ships, coasts and clouds. He was always looking up, so much so that in his paintings it sometimes seems that our planet is but a platform from which to see the sky.

Turner would not have intended his late, loose watercolour studies to have been exhibited publicly. Nevertheless, these (once) private, informal paintings reveal how he thought of landscapes in terms of pure colour. 💙

☁️ Joseph Mallord William Turner, Sea and Sky, English Coast c.1832, Tate Collection https://bit.ly/4dwzqHO

🖤 Man Ray, producer of some of the most celebrated photographs of the modern era, was born on this day in 1890.

Man Ray was a significant contributor to the Dada and Surrealist movements, although his ties to each were informal. He produced major works in a variety of media but considered himself a painter above all.

Man Ray was best known for his pioneering photography, and was a renowned fashion and portrait photographer. He is also noted for his work with photograms, which he called "rayographs".

📷 Eileen Agar snapped this portrait of her friend and fellow Surrealist Man Ray at the beach in Juan-les-pins, France, in September 1937.

Bank Holiday Monday + International Dog Day = A selection of sleepy dogs. 💤
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🐕‍🦺 Edwin Henry Landseer, Sleeping Bloodhound, exhibited 1835
📷 ​Eileen Agar, Photograph of Joseph Bard sitting with Dandy the dog, 1930s
🐩​ John Singer Sargent, The Misses Hunter, 1902
🛋️ ​Lucian Freud, Girl with a White Dog, 1951–1952
🐶 ​David Wojnarowicz, Untitled, 1988
🪑 Meraud Guevara, Seated Woman with Small Dog, c.1939
​🐕 Vanessa Bell, Black and white negative of Angelica Bell smiling and holding Clinker the dog in front of a brick wall at Charleston, Firle, Sussex, c1927–8
​🎶 Ithell Colquhoun, Painting showing a woman and man (playing a flute) sitting in the countryside with a dog, c.1927–30

Giddy up! Today marks 300 years since the birth of one of Britain's most beloved horse painters, George Stubbs. 🐎🖌️🎨

Stubbs’ paintings of horses marked a milestone in animal painting. Rather than appearing as supporting characters in his paintings, Stubbs brought these majestic creatures to the forefront—making horses the mane event. 👀

The self-taught artist was devoted to understanding horses, from the hide to the muscles, arteries, tendons, and down to the bone. By studying horses in detail, Stubbs achieved unbridled realism in his images.

🐴 Otho, with John Larkin up 1768
🐴 Mares and Foals in a River Landscape c.1763–8
🐴 Grey Hunter with a Groom and a Greyhound at Creswell Crags c.1762–4
🐴 Bay Hunter by a Lake 1787

📍 See Stubbs' four-legged beauties up close in our free Tate Britain display 'Stubbs and Wallinger: The Horse in Art'. https://bit.ly/3yFWFRg

It’s Notting Hill Carnival weekend! 🎉

These photos are by Horace Ové, a Trinidadian-born British photographer, filmmaker and founding member of the Notting Hill Carnival. He documented the birth of the celebration and its growth through the 70s and 80s.

As his son Zak Ové remembers: ‘His peer group brought this tradition with them when they migrated from the Caribbean… They were attracted to one another because they wanted a better world, and the world they imagined was nothing like the one they inherited.’

🎶 Generations, Notting Hill Carnival c.1969
🖤 First Generation Children, Ladbroke Grove, 1969
☀️ Walking Proud, Notting Hill Carnival c. 1972
🔊 Sound System Boys, Notting Hill Carnival c. 1980
🎨 Clowns, Trinidad, 1969

🎞️ The 80s: Photographing Britain 🎞️
📆 Opens 21 November
📍Tate Britain

Explore photography from one of the UK’s most critical decades, the 1980s.

This exhibition traces the work of a diverse community of photographers creating radical responses to the turbulent Thatcher years, set against the backdrop of race uprisings, the miner strikes, section 28, the AIDS pandemic and gentrification. Explore powerful photography that gave voice and visibility to underrepresented groups in society in a decade of social and political change.

🔗 Tickets now on sale: https://bit.ly/3YW6epM

📸 Ting A Ling, from Handsworth Self Portrait, 1979. Derek Bishton, Brian Homer & John Reardon.

Photograms by György Kepes 🖐️ 🎞️ ☀️

The photographic prints are created without using a camera by layering objects onto photographic paper and exposing it to light. The technique is as old as photography itself, but emerged again in the early 1920s. They are also known as ‘rayographs’ because of artist Man Ray’s personalisation of the technique. https://bit.ly/3WHyn0Y

🖐️ György Kepes, Hand on Black Ground, c.1939-40
🥚​ György Kepes, Lily and Egg, c.1939-40
📐​ György Kepes, Compass and Strainer Photogram, c.1939-40

'The photograph fulfils my deep need to stop things from disappearing... I have tried to create order out of chaos, to find stability in flux and beauty in the most unlikely places.' - Dorothy Bohm

Born in 1924 in East Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russia), Dorothy Bohm fled to Lithuania in 1932 to escape Na**sm. In 1939, she was gifted a Leica camera by her father before being sent to safety in Britain.

Bohm's journey led her to become a celebrated British photographer, known for her poignant portraiture, captivating street scenes, pioneering use of colour, and iconic images of London and Paris. She died in London on 15 March 2023, at the age of 98.
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Today is World Photography Day! What is your favourite subject to photograph?

Petticoat Lane Market, East End, London, c.1960–9
Earlham Street, Covent Garden, London, c.1960–9
Notting Hill, London, c.1960
Market stall, Islington, London, c.1960–9
Petticoat Lane Market, East End, London, c.1960–9
Paris, 1970

https://bit.ly/46NO9fD

Sunday night has arrived. We hope you had a lovely weekend. 💚💤

🏠 Ian Hamilton Finlay's 'The End (Collaboration with Ian Gardner)' 1975–6 is on free display at Tate Modern 🏭 https://bit.ly/4diySFO

Summer with Seurat ☀️ 🎨

Georges Seurat painted this work while on holiday on the Normandy coast in the summer of 1885. He made a study on the spot but refined and developed the image in his studio.

Seurat aimed to place painting on a scientific basis in its treatment of light and colour and, using a style known as Divisionism, combined small brushstrokes of complementary colours to create a luminous effect in his works.

🖼️ Georges Seurat, Le Bec du Hoc, Grandcamp, 1885 https://bit.ly/4fEQ5uF

‘My work is about opening up a conversation and opening up other ways of seeing’ - ​New Delhi-based artist, photographer, writer and activist Sheba Chhachhi. 📷
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Chhachhi captures her worldview through the camera lens. Her work focuses on issues surrounding women and ecology, and she was actively involved in the women’s rights movement in 1980s. The above image, captured in 1982, is from a series of work that records the artist's long-term engagement with the feminist movement in India. Her images, both staged and documentary, were used in posters, pamphlets and street theatre campaigns to end violence against women. ‘I was literally shouting slogans one moment and pointing the camera the next’, she says.

Sheba Chhachhi, Urvashi - Anti Dowry sit-in, 1982, from Seven Lives and a Dream, Tate Collection https://bit.ly/4dm2mTl

Taking a closer look at Cossacks by Wassily Kandinsky 🔍

Kandinsky believed paintings did not need to represent the real world. If you look closely at this artwork, there are some recognisable shapes - the cossacks (Russian cavalrymen) in their orange hats on the right of the painting, the castle on a hill and birds filling the sky on the top right. But there are also abstract shapes. 🏰 🦅

The artist felt emotions could be expressed through the way colours and lines were arranged in a painting. He linked musical tones to particular colours, and considered colour to have a powerful spiritual impact, saying ‘The first colours which made a strong impression on me were light juice green, white, crimson red, black and yellow ochre. These memories go back to the third year of my life.’
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​Along with other artists in the Blue Rider group, Kandinsky experimented with the relationship between sound and colour, developing a bold, dramatic and distinctive style. 🔷

🌈 Wassily Kandinsky, Cossacks, 1910–1. On display in Expressionists at Tate Modern until 20 October. Book now. Members go free. 🎟️ https://bit.ly/3I2N9J1