tate

Open today at Tate Modern 🩸⚙️ 🏭   Using the building’s own history as a power station, this year’s Hyundai Commission is by South Korean artist #MireLee. Transforming the Turbine Hall with fabric hanging sculptures and epic mechanical installations, Mire Lee has reimagined Tate Modern as a living factory.   A fascinating mix of materials made of silicone and chains bring her creations to life and challenge our ideas of what is beautiful, perverse, provocative and desirable. Open Wound invites us to revel in contradictory emotions: from awe and disgust to compassion, fear and love.   Hyundai Commission: Mire Lee: Open Wound is now open at Tate Modern until 16 March 2025. 

In partnership with @hyundai.artlab

Our five favourite queer artworks currently on display at Tate Britain! 🏳️‍🌈 A huge thank you to our tour guide @jamie_windust. ✨ 🎨 1. Glyn Warren Philpot, Repose on the Flight into Egypt 1922 🎨 2. Gluck, Flora’s Cloak 1923 🎨 3. Duncan Grant, Bathing 1911 🎨 4. Rene Matić 🎨 5. Francis Bacon, Triptych August 1972 We have regular LGBTQIA+ art tours at Tate Britain, which offer a unique opportunity to experience the collection through the lens of gender identity and sexuality. ❤️

Was this painting made using magic? Is it the biggest canvas in the world? There’s only one way to find out. 🎨 🌍 We joined #TateKids as they asked some of our youngest visitors to describe what they saw when in front of Oscar Murillo’s giant painting ‘Manifestation’ at Tate Britain. 🏛️ ✨ 💡 How would you describe the artwork? Stay tuned for more #WhatDoYouSee!

However you're travelling, we're wishing everyone heading home for the festive period a safe (and speedy) journey 🌟 🍼 Yutaka Takanashi, Toshi-e, 1974 🚘 Wolfgang Tillmans, New Family, 2001 🦌 Vanessa Winship, Deer on highway embankment, Buffalo, NY, 2011–12 🧳 Peter Fraser, Wells No. 1, from Everyday Icons, 1985–6 ✈️ Mark Wallinger, Threshold to the Kingdom, 2000 ❄️ Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen, Kendal Street (Byker), 1969 🚏 Ursula Schulz-Dornburg, Erevan-Parakar, 2004 🚂 Sergio Larrain, London, 1959 🛣️ Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still No.48, 1979 🚗 Shikanosuke Yagaki, Untitled (Street), 1930–9

Have you got your Christmas cards in the post? ✉️ Here's a few of our favourite designs by the British artist John Nash. 🌲Christmas card, with a design of a man with a Christmas tree, date unknown 🛷 Christmas card, ‘The Ambush’, date unknown 🎁 Christmas card, with a design of Robin as Santa, date unknown 🎄Christmas card with a design of Father Christmas stealing a Christmas tree, 1958 🎣 Christmas card with a design of Father Christmas and anglers, date unknown 🎶 Christmas card, with a design of unwelcome carol singers, date unknown 💤 Christmas card with a design of a Christmas dream (with caricature of John Nash), 1929

Something spellbindingly wicked for a Wednesday 🔮 🌙 ✨ ​ ​Miracles, magic and the power of prophecy play an important part in John William Waterhouse's art. In 'The Magic Circle' 1886, an enchantress draws a protective spell with her wand. Close by sits her cauldron, a frog and some ravens, all against the backdrop of a barren landscape. ​ ​🎨 John William Waterhouse, The Magic Circle, 1886, Tate Collection

‘One eye sees, the other feels.’ – Paul Klee, born #OnThisDay 1879 🌃 Paul Klee was a giant of twentieth-century art, one of the great creative innovators of the time. Witty, inventive, magical, his paintings resist easy classification, cutting a radical figure in European modernism. His influence on abstraction can be seen in the works of Rothko, Miró and beyond. Klee’s painting 'Walpurgis Night' marks the transition from winter to spring, falling on the eve of the first of May. In folk tradition, witches would gather on the Brocken, the highest of the Harz Mountains, to perform rituals to ward off evil. The artist’s son Felix Klee said, ‘The ghostly scenes on the Brocken - from Goethe's Faust - often exerted a fascination on my father. At Easter 1923 we travelled from Wernigerode through the Harz Mountains to Braunschweig. The legendary traditions of this region and my father's assimilation of them are things I shall never forget. These I take to be the true source of this work!' 🌃 Paul Klee (1879–1940), Walpurgis Night, 1935

‘I think that making art is a way of sharing yourself, and saying to others it’s okay, you’re not alone.’ – Lorraine O’Grady 🖤 We are deeply saddened that the groundbreaking artist Lorraine O’Grady has died. Spanning more than five decades, O’Grady’s powerful multi-disciplinary practice explored the tensions between culture, race and class, and the cultural construction of black female identity. In our 2017 film, we journeyed with filmmaker and actress Zawe Ashton as she visited Lorraine O’Grady in her New York City home to learn more about her work’s exploration of black female subjectivity. In O’Grady’s own words, ‘We need mirrors to see ourselves. If we are not mirrored, we can’t.’ 🖤

Our #WorkOfTheWeek is the last major painting that Edward Burne-Jones completed. 🖌️ 🖼️   It was dedicated to his close friend, the poet Algernon Swinburne. The idea of the God of Love guiding a Pilgrim on his quest comes from The Romaunt of the Rose by the medieval poet Geoffrey Chaucer, a book that Burne-Jones had read while a student at Oxford. The book influenced many of the works he produced in collaboration with William Morris. Here, Love is presented both as a Christian angel and as Cupid, the classical god of love.   🎨 Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones, Bt, Love and the Pilgrim, 1896–7. Tate Collection

‘I realised ever more clearly that the lighting was of critical importance for the clarity of the work. […] The effect of light on the polished surface of a metal utensil, a play of shadows seldom noticed, surprising contrasts of black and white, the problem of achieving a happy spatial arrangement in a picture, created inexhaustible surprises.’ Aenne Biermann was a Jewish German photographer and one of the major advocates of 'New Objectivity', an art movement that developed in Germany in the 1920s and offered a return to unsentimental reality, as opposed to the more abstract or romantic. Biermann was a self-taught photographer and her first subjects were her children, Helga and Gershon (swipe left to see Helga's portrait). What started as ‘private souvenirs’ developed into a sophisticated practice, documenting the world around her from a new perspective. She developed an interest in the natural forms of flowers, leaves, minerals and crystals and later she photographed household utensils with a desire to extract something unfamiliar from everyday experience. Most of her photographs were shot between 1925-33 - she worked intesively, far into the night in her darkroom. She was exhibited internationally and became an accepted member of the German photographic avant-garde. She also campaigned for the introduction of photography in schools, emphasising its educational potential. In 1933, she died aged 36. Being of Jewish origin, Biermann’s archive was confiscated by the Nazis in 1939. Of the three thousand or so negatives she made, about four hundred prints survive. 🥀 ​ ​​🌳 Hazelnut Catkins, 1931 🤳​ Untitled (Self Portrait), 1931 ​☕ Ceramic Cup, 1929 🧸 My Child, 1931

‘It became clear to me that new frameworks of pure colour must be created.’ - Kazimir Malevich ⬛ 🎨 Malevich’s abstract paintings belong to the intense period of artistic experimentation that developed in a turbulent period of the First World War and the Bolshevik Revolution. In 1915 Malevich abandoned figurative forms in favour of a purely creative experience of geometric abstraction. His first such work was a statement, as he painted a black square on a white canvas, marking a crucial moment for development of painting. His painting ‘Dynamic Suprematism’, created between 1915 and 1916, belongs to a group of works he developed using a series of geometric forms against a white background. The work can be closely related to the development of suprematism, a movement established by Malevich in 1913 that explored colour and form in painting through basic geometric shapes. See Malevich’s painting in our free Tate Modern display, Artist and Society. 🏭

What does your Sunday look like? 🦆 ​ ​📷 Hans Casparius (1900–1986), Regents Park, London, 1930, printed 1970–9