London.- Tate Britain is pleased to present “Migrations”, on view at the museum from December 31st through August 12th 2012. This exhibition explores how British art has been shaped by migration. Featuring artists from Van Dyck, James Abbott McNeill Whistler and Piet Mondrian to Steve McQueen and Francis Alÿs , Migrations traces not only the movement of artists, but the circulation of art and ideas. Beginning with works from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the exhibition will show that much British art from this period was made by artists from abroad, including Antwerp-born Anthony Van Dyck , the court painter whose famous portraits such as Charles I 1636 (The Chequers Trust) have come to shape our perceptions of the British aristocracy of this time. It also explores the establishment of the Royal Academy, with works by the Swiss-Austrian Angelica Kaufmann, the Anglo-American Benjamin West and others who were fundamental to its foundation in 1768.
Artists were involved in an extensive interchange of ideas between Britain, France and America in the late-nineteenth-century, as demonstrated in works such as John Singer Sargent ’s Mrs. Carl Meyer and her Children 1896. Other important figures who marked the course of British Art include Piet Mondrian, Naum Gabo and Laszlo Maholy-Nagy , who sought refuge in Britain whilst escaping political unrest and war in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s. Artists from the 50s and 60s who moved to the UK from the commonwealth, conceptual artists who considered themselves ‘stateless’ global citizens rather than tied any one place, and groups such as the Black Audio Film Collective, whose work sought to unearth the possibilities of being both ‘Black’ and ‘British’ in the 1980s, will show how British art has, directly or indirectly, come to reflect a much wider international stage over time. The exhibition will feature recent work by contemporary artists who use the moving image as a versatile tool for both documenting and questioning reality, including Zineb Sedira’s fourteen screen installation Floating Coffins 2009 and Steve McQueen’s Static 2009, which probes ideas of freedom and migration through the potent symbol of the Statue of Liberty. Over 500 years, developments in transport, new artistic institutions, politics and economics have all contributed to artists choosing to settle temporarily or permanently in Britain. Migrations examines how British art has been informed by a long and intricate history of the movement of people to and from the country, raising questions about the formation of a national collection of British art against a continually shifting demographic.
Tate Britain is the national gallery of British art. Located in London, it is one of the family of four Tate galleries which display selections from the Tate Collection. The other three galleries are Tate Modern , also in London, Tate Liverpool , in the north-west, and Tate St Ives , in Cornwall, in the south-west. The entire Tate Collection is available online. Tate Britain is the world centre for the understanding and enjoyment of British art and works actively to promote interest in British art internationally. The displays at Tate Britain call on the greatest collection of British art in the world to present an unrivalled picture of the development of art in Britain from the time of the Tudor monarchs in the sixteenth century, to the present day. The Collection comprises the national collection of British art from the year 1500 to the present day, and international modern art. Some of the highlights of the Tate collection of British art include rich holdings of portraiture from the age of Queen Elizabeth I; of the work of William Hogarth , sometimes called the father of English painting; of the eighteenth-century portraitists Thomas Gainsborough and Joshua Reynolds; of the animal painter George Stubbs ; of the artists of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood who revolutionised British art in the nineteenth century; and in the twentieth century of the work of Stanley Spencer , Henry Moore , Barbara Hepworth , Francis Bacon and the Young British Artists (YBAs) of the 1990s. The very latest contemporary art is presented through the Art Now programme and the annual Turner Prize exhibition. Special attention is given to three outstanding British artists from the Romantic age. William Blake and John Constable have dedicated spaces within the gallery, while the unique J. M. W. Turner Collection of about 300 paintings and many thousands of watercolours is housed in the specially built Clore Gallery. Visit the museum’s website at … http://www.tate.org.uk/britain