LONDON.- Tate announced today highlights of its 2017 exhibition programme, which will feature major retrospectives of contemporary artists including David Hockney, Wolfgang Tillmans, Rachel Whiteread and Emilia and Ilya Kabokov. And fifty years after the celebrated exhibition at Tate curated by David Sylvester, Tate Modern will hold a major retrospective of Giacometti at Tate Modern and later in 2017, the most comprehensive survey of Modigliani’s work ever seen in the UK.
Landmarks in the relationship between art and social history will also be explored in Queer British Art, Soul of a Nation:Art in the Age of Black Power and Red Star Over Russia. And The EY Exhibition: Impressionists in London, French Artists in Exile will explore how French artists such as Monet and Pissarro interpreted British culture and Society.
At Tate Britain, the world’s most extensive retrospective of the work of David Hockney will offer an unprecedented overview of the artist’s work to date. As the artist approaches his 80th birthday, this exhibition will celebrate his achievement across painting, drawing, print, photography, video and digital media.
Hockney’s work will also feature in the first major exhibition in Britain to focus on queer British art. Queer British Art is scheduled to mark the 50th anniversary of the decriminalisation of male homosexuality in Britain and will cover the period 1861 – 1967. Opening in April 2017, the exhibition will explore how seismic shifts in gender and sexuality found expression in the arts over 100 years.
The EY Exhibition: Impressionists in London, French Artists in Exile will be the first large-scale examination of the remarkable art that came from French artists who sought exile in London during and after the Franco-Prussian War. Monet, Pissarro and Tissot’s interpretations of British culture and society will be among the works on display.
Tate Britain will celebrate Rachel Whiteread’s position as one of the UK’s most highly respected sculptors in September with an exhibition spanning her 30 year career. It will be the most substantial showing of Whiteread’s work to date and include new work not previously exhibited.
At Tate Modern, Wolfgang Tillmans will bring the artist’s ‘extended practice’ to the fore, offering a new focus on his photographs, video, digital slide projections, publications, curatorial projects and recorded music. In March, Tillmans will also take over Tate’s South Tank for ten days with a specially-commissioned installation featuring live music events.
Giacometti is one of the few artists of the last century whose work is often more recognisable than his name, his distinctive elongated figures are inescapably linked to the post-War climate of existential despair. Giacometti has rarely been explored this fully and the exhibition will include some never before seen plasters and drawings alongside more familiar bronze sculptures and oil paintings. Later in the year, the gallery will also hold a retrospective of Modigliani who produced some of the most memorable art of the early twentieth century including his remarkable series of nudes and elongated portraits. Including works in different media, the exhibition will place Modigliani’s work in dialogue with artworks by his contemporaries.
Spanning the period 1963-83, Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power will explore how the category ‘Black Art’ was defined, rejected and redefined by artists across the United States. Most of the works will be on display in the UK for the first time and the Tate Modern exhibition will shine a bright light on the vital contribution of black artists to a crucial period in American art.
2017 will mark the centenary of the October Revolution, which heralded a wave of innovation and design in Russia. To mark this Tate Modern will stage two exhibitions in the autumn from either end of the century evoking Russia from then to now. Red Star Over Russia will explore how Russian and Soviet artists created a unique visual identity over five decades, from the first revolution of 1905 to the death of Stalin in 1953. Rarely seen posters, photographs, and other graphic works from the David King Collection – now part of Tate – will be on display. Meanwhile the work of Russian contemporary artists Ilya and Emilia Kabakov will be explored in a major exhibition. It will present Ilya Kabakov’s paintings, drawings and albums made in Moscow from the 1950s to the 1980s before he emigrated to the United States alongside the ‘total’ installations made in collaboration with Emilia from 1989 to the present, which explore the history and visual culture of the Soviet Union.
Also at Tate Modern will be a retrospective of the highly-regarded influential Turkish artist Fahrelnissa Zeid known for her large scale abstract works that drew on Islamic, Byzantine, Arab and Persian influences and European style.
Following the success of Art Gym, Tate Liverpool is handing over its exhibition space to the public for We Have Your Art Gallery in spring 2017, and the Turner Prize 2017 will be presented at the Ferens Art Gallery in Hull, next year’s UK City of Culture.
The Tate St Ives project, to expand, improve and transform the gallery, will be completed in autumn 2017. Their spring season of two exhibitions will focus on the ceramics studio, the ocean and the landscape: That Continuous Thing: Artists & the Ceramics Studio, 1920 – Today and Jessica Warboys.
