International Art News

Edvard Munch - Girls on the Bridge - 1901 (1902–27.) - oil on canvas 136 X 125.5 cm - National Gallery, Oslo

Until the 14th of October 2012 – Tate Modern
Few other modern artists are better known and yet less understood than Norwegian painter Edvard Munch (1863–1944). This exhibition examines the artist’s work from the 20th century, including sixty paintings, many from the Munch Museum in Oslo, with a rare showing of his work in film and photography.

Munch is often seen as a 19th-century Symbolist painter but this exhibition shows how he engaged with modernity and was inspired by the everyday life outside of his studio such as street scenes and incidents reported in the media – including The House is Burning 1925–7, a sensational view of a real life event with people fleeing the scene of a burning building.

The show also examines how Munch often repeated a single motif over a long period of time in order to re-work it, as can be seen in the different versions of his most celebrated works, such as The Sick Child 1885–1927 and Girls on the Bridge 1902–27.

Edvard Munch, The Sick Child 1907 © Munch Museum/Munch-EllingsendGroup/DACS 2002

Munch’s use of prominent foregrounds and strong diagonals reference the technological developments in cinema and photography at the time. Creating the illusion of figures moving towards the spectator, this visual trick can be seen in many of Munch’s most innovative works such as Workers on their Way Home 1913–14. He was also keenly aware of the visual effects brought on by the introduction of electric lighting on theatre stages and used this to create striking effect in works such as The Artist and his Model 1919–21.

Like other painters such as Bonnard and Vuillard, Munch adopted photography in the early years of the 20th century and largely focused on self-portraits, which he obsessively repeated. In the 1930s he developed an eye disease and made poignant works which charted the effects of his degenerating sight.

Tate Modern

Anthony McCall, Line Describing a Cone 1973 © Anthony McCall, courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery, New York - Sunday 22 July A rare poportunity to see all four 1974 cone films by Anthony McCal

The Tanks: Art in Action  – A fifteen-week festival from 18 July – 28 October 2012 – Tate Modern
What already impressed everyone about the Tate Modern when it was inaugurated was its huge size. His former electric plant has been able to offer contemporary art absolutely spectacular spaces that have ensured the public’s passion as we can see in the installations presented in the hall of the Turbines over the last ten years. While waiting for the extension carried out by Herzog and de Meuron to be concluded by 2016 (which will add 21,000 square metres i.e. 60% additional space), the museum has decided to recuperate other areas: the reservoirs where the oil used to run the plant was installed. These underground rooms with vast dimensions (30 metres long, 7 metres tall) will be inaugurated on 18 July 2012, with an original theme: they will host one of the largest concentrations in Europe of living art, happenings and performances. The list of artists includes Korean Sung Hwan Kim as well as Cuban artist Tania Bruguera or Flemish Anne Teresa de Keersmaecker.

Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker - Photo: Herman Sorgeloos - Thursday 19 – Friday 20 July One of the most important choreographers of the 20th century performs widely acclaimed Fase: Four movements to the music of Steve Reich

An excellent opening to the Cultural Olympiad and to the London Festival 2012.

Tate Modern

Damien Hirst - The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living 1991 - © Damien Hirst

Until the 9th of September 2012 – Tate Modern
Damien Hirst first came to public attention in London in 1988 when he conceived and curated Freeze, an exhibition in a disused warehouse which showed his work and that of his friends and fellow students at Goldsmiths College. In the nearly quarter of a century since that pivotal show, Hirst has become one of the most influential artists of his generation.
Image of The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living 1991

Spot painting

This will be the first substantial survey of his work in a British institution and will bring together key works from over twenty years. The exhibition will include iconic sculptures from his Natural History series, including The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living 1991, in which he suspended a shark in formaldehyde. Also included will be vitrines such as A Thousand Years from 1990, medicine cabinets, pill cabinets and instrument cabinets in addition to seminal paintings made throughout his career using butterflies and flies as well as spots and spins. The two-part installation In and Out of Love, not shown in its entirety since its creation in 1991 and Pharmacy 1992 will be among the highlights of the exhibition.

Museum Hours

Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera – Tate Modern 28 May  –  3 October 2010
Exposed offers a fascinating look at pictures made on the sly, without the explicit permission of the people depicted. With photographs from the late nineteenth century to present day, the pictures present a shocking, illuminating and witty perspective on iconic and taboo subjects.

Beginning with the idea of the ‘unseen photographer’, Exposed presents 250 works by celebrated artists and photographers including Brassaï’s erotic Secret Paris of the 1930s images; Weegee’s iconic photograph of Marilyn Monroe; and Nick Ut’s reportage image of children escaping napalm attacks in the Vietnam War. Sex and celebrity is an important part of the exhibition, presenting photographs of Liz Taylor and Richard Burton, Paris Hilton on her way to prison and the assassination of JFK. Other renowned photographers represented in the show include Guy Bourdin, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Philip Lorca DiCorcia, Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Nan Goldin, Lee Miller, Helmut Newton and Man Ray.

The UK is now the most surveyed country in the world. We have an obsession with voyeurism, privacy laws, freedom of media, and surveillance – images captured and relayed on camera phones, YouTube or reality TV.

Much of Exposed focuses on surveillance, including works by both amateur and press photographers, and images produced using automatic technology such as CCTV. The issues raised are particularly relevant in the current climate, with topical debates raging around the rights and desires of individuals, terrorism and the increasing availability and use of surveillance. Exposed confronts these issues and their implications head-on.

Museum Hours