Kiefer, Koons, Ruscha, Therrien and Warhol
ARTIST ROOMS: The d'Offay Donation
Apr 14th 2009
on view from the end of April through 2010
ARTIST ROOMS is a new collection of international contemporary art which has been created through one of the largest and most imaginative gifts of art ever made to museums in Britain. The gift was made by Anthony d'Offay in 2008, with the assistance of the National Heritage Memorial Fund (NHMF), The Art Fund and the Scottish and British Governments. ARTIST ROOMS is jointly owned and managed by National Galleries of Scotland and Tate on behalf of the nation.
The guiding principle of ARTIST ROOMS is the concept of individual rooms devoted to particular artists. The collection of over 725 works includes major groups of work by seminal artists. The 2009 ARTIST ROOMS On Tour with The Art Fund supported by The Scottish Government will include works by Diane Arbus, Joseph Beuys, Vija Celmins, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Ellen Gallagher, Gilbert & George, Johan Grimonprez, Damien Hirst, Jenny Holzer, Alex Katz, Anselm Kiefer, Jeff Koons, Jannis Kounellis, Sol LeWitt, Richard Long, Robert Mapplethorpe, Agnes Martin, Ron Mueck, Bruce Nauman, Gerhard Richter, Ed Ruscha, Robert Therrien, Bill Viola, Andy Warhol, Lawrence Weiner, and Francesca Woodman. Many of the rooms were conceived as specific installations by the artists themselves and have been assembled so that the work of important contemporary artists can be seen and appreciated in depth.
The aim of the collection is to create a new national resource of contemporary art that will be shared with museums and galleries throughout the UK so as to inspire new audiences, especially of young people. ARTIST ROOMS is being officially launched in 2009 with a series of exhibitions and displays that will be staged at Tate sites and the National Galleries of Scotland and at museums and galleries across the country. This is the first time a national collection has been shared and shown simultaneously across the UK, and has only been made possible through the exceptional generosity of independent charity The Art Fund and, in Scotland, of The Scottish Government.
Anselm Kiefer (born 1945)
Three rooms comprising six works: three early paintings (Palette, 1981, Urd Werdande Skuld (The Norns), 1983 and Man under a Pyramid, 1996); a landscape painting; and two major installations (Cette obscure clarté qui tombe des étoiles, 1999 and Palmsonntag, 2006).
A key figure in European post-war culture, Anselm Kiefer's art derives from his great awareness of history, theology, mythology, literature and philosophy, and an extraordinary ability to work with all kinds of materials from lead to concrete, from straw to human hair and sunflower seeds. He grew up near the French border on the Rhine. France was the land of his dreams on the other side of the river. In his early work he set out to understand Germany's recent history, then still a taboo subject and one which inevitably aroused criticism and misunderstanding when he attempted it. He was interested in Beuys's work and visited him but was not a pupil of his. Pictures of this period show Kiefer setting out on his journey, walking through a forest holding a burning branch. Later works draw on German military history, Wagnerian mythology and Nazi architecture to grapple with the possibility of pursuing creativity in the light of catastrophic human suffering. Kiefer's technique of layering paint and debris gives visceral life to his preoccupations with decay and re-creation.
The d'Offay Donation includes major works from across the artist's career. Palette (1981) expands on his theme equating painting to burning, which will cleanse the countryside and cauterise the wound inflicted by Nazism. Here painting is symbolised by a palette suspended above a smouldering abyss by a rope which is alight in several places. The painting Urd, Werdande, Skuld refers to the norns or fates of Germanic mythology whose names are Past, Present and Future and who sit by the well at the foot of the Yggdrasil, spinning or weaving the fate of men. They are an invisible presence in the grandiose vaulted emptiness of one of the un-built monuments to the delusion of the Third Reich.
After the reunification of Germany Kiefer moved to Barjac in the South of France in 1992 where he continued to develop preoccupations he had already initiated but which also had wider implications. His exploration of revolution in generation and in particular The Women of the Revolution began in Germany and expanded to include Women of Antiquity. His study of ancient belief-systems such as the Kabbala also grew. He travelled widely, to South America, India, China and Australia. His painting took on both a world and a cosmic view. In Barjac he worked on an ever larger scale. Confronted with the plants, climate and history of the south of France, inevitably sunflowers made their way into his work. He became increasingly interested in natural cycles, and in Robert Fludd's theories about the lives of plants, the microcosm and the macrocosm, and his suggestion that for every plant there exists a correlated star. Man under a Pyramid (1996), reflects the artist's interest in exploring his mind and body through meditation and in relating it to the stars and the cosmos through the pyramid, in this case seen in the form of a large crumbling stone pyramid from the ancient remains of Mexico or Egypt. Cette obscure clarté qui tombe des étoiles (The dark light that falls from the stars) is a favourite line from Le Cid by Corneille which came to mind when Kiefer began to work with sunflowers: 'There was an obvious parallel with the black seeds on the flower and the night and the stars. The seeds were the stars. When I stuck them on a white canvas they became inverted stars, black on white like a negative.' Kiefer's preoccupation with the stars has now developed further into various huge paintings of star maps. The huge installation Palm Sunday (2006), which refers to the Christian holy day, the Sunday before Easter, combines the balance between death and resurrection, decay and recreation so characteristic of Kiefer's work. The theme of Palm Sunday is the triumph before the betrayal, and death. There is some sense that nature is the betrayed in the fallen palm and framed ossuary of branches which covers the wall, though regeneration is always a possibility.
Jeff Koons (born 1955)
Two rooms comprising 17 works: New Hoover Convertibles, 1981–7; a basketball piece, Encased, 1983–93; Winter Bears, 1988; the billboard Made in Heaven, 1989; Mound of Flowers, 1991; Bourgeois Bust – Jeff and Ilona, 1991; a rare set of nine Easyfun mirrors, 1999; Caterpillar (with chains),, 2002 and a portfolio of prints, Art Magazine Ads, 1988–9.
Through his use first of everyday items such as vacuum cleaners and basketballs and later by creating oversized kitsch objects, Jeff Koons reflects upon the power of consumer industries and the aesthetics and culture of taste. Although Koons makes use of the kind of references reminiscent of Pop Art his means of production, first in the studio and then demanding total perfection from specialists in each chosen medium, far outstrips anything from that earlier period. His perfectionism is legendary. Drawing together a range of styles and spanning a broad chronology from early 1980s to the late 1990s, the works in The d'Offay Donation highlight some of the artist's most important series. In New Hoover Convertibles Koons preserves a banal, household object as a new commodity in perpetuity making its function obsolete within a contained vitrine. The idea of protected perfection is at the heart of
Ed Ruscha (born 1937)
One room comprising 22 works, including five paintings and 17 works on paper.
Ed Ruscha's exploration of language and American West Coast culture centred on Hollywood has made him one of the pre-eminent artists of his generation. Since the early 1960s he has channelled his fascination with words and the act of communication into books, print-making, drawing and painting. His work has much in common with Pop Art, but while Ruscha's carefully planned paintings and drawings draw on popular references and mass media, his playful use of irony, paradox and absurdist juxtapositions have set him firmly apart from any movement. The d'Offay Donation holds a remarkable survey of Ruscha's work dating between 1962 and 2005, including an important group of drawings and several key paintings that explore the various series that the artist has made since the 1960s. Early works such as Honk (1962) and Dance? (1973) depict single, pithy words in strong typographic format, while the catch-phrase drawings of the mid 1970s such as I plead insanity because I'm just crazy about that little girl (1976) invoke vernacular language against single fields of colour. A more brooding atmosphere emerges in the later series, The End, which illustrates the words with imagery that recalls fading film credits. The artist's enjoyment of the contradictory and illogical is at play in the mountain paintings, a sequence of works begun in the late 1990s in which sublime alpine landscapes form the backdrop for banal statements, as found in Pay Nothing Until April ( 2003).
Robert Therrien (born 1947)
Two rooms comprising five works: a single-room installation, Red Room, 2000–7; the unique No Title (Table and Four Chairs), 2003; an editioned object, No Title (oil can), 2004; a unique photograph, No Title (scrubbrush panel), 1997; and a found brick paper drawing dated 2003.
Robert Therrien presents a world of the unexpected filled with objects which are both familiar and strange. It can seem a fairytale place of deceptively childish charm and logic where ideas can literally be translated into reality. Inanimate things can become strikingly animated, soft and light become hard and heavy and size seems out of control. During the 1980s the artist began to make objects with simple recognisable shapes such as jugs, coffins and doors, transforming them through a variety of media including copper, wood and bronze. This developed his engagement with the notion of the found object, addressed most explicitly in his found brick paper drawings. His work with changing scale began in the early 1990s. Some objects he uses are found, some are made by and for the artist. His use of domestic images might suggest an interest in the spatial world of still-life but his interest in the human body's interaction with space is more connected to architecture. Therrien's images and the objects he selects expose the hidden drama of the unnoticed, invisible, physical and mental relationships which exist in the world of human beings, between human beings and between the objects they create to help them live their lives. The d'Offay Donation comprises a group of exemplary works which express both the ambition and surrealism of Therrien's practice, including a room-sized version of table and chairs from 2003 and a recent, striking installation, Red Room (2007).
Andy Warhol (1928–1987)
Six rooms comprising 232 works, surveying the artist's career through a range of media. The package includes 20 paintings (including important diptychs and self-portraits); 32 photographs; 50 early drawings and watercolours dating from c.1950s – 1962; four drawings dating between 1974 and 1981; 126 posters.
Andy Warhol is the most influential artist of the post-war period. The most famous proponent of Pop Art, his earliest works depict consumer goods and images from the popular press. Many of his most powerful images betray his enduring fascination with celebrity and mortality. The selection from The d'Offay Donation includes a great array of important works representing all phases of the artist's career and a cross-section of media. Particular highlights are the unique collection of 50 early works on paper as well as the iconic multiple Skulls (1976) and the multiple Self-portrait Strangulation (1978). The collection includes a unique room of late diptychs as well as the celebrated four-part Camouflage of 1986 which were the central exhibit in the Andy Warhol retrospective at the National Gallery of Scotland in 2007. The d'Offay Donation includes a group of spectacular stitched photographs as well as a series of Polaroid self-portraits. The collection is complemented by 126 Warhol posters from all periods of the artist's career, including his films.
VISITOR INFORMATION
Tate Modern
Bankside
London SE1 9TG
ENGLAND
T. 44.207.887.888
Website: Tate Modern | ARTIST ROOMS