LONDON.- Tate announced that works by three great American contemporary artists – George Condo, Louise Lawler and Richard Tuttle – have joined the collection displays at Tate Modern. These three new rooms open on Monday 5 December, featuring works which have all been recently acquired by Tate through the support of the Karpidas Family.
The acquisitions include 43 drawings and a painting by George Condo, a widely recognised figure in American art who was not previously represented in Tate’s collection. Condo himself has specially curated this room of his works at Tate Modern. The arresting and intriguing images show the artist’s incredible range, as well as the influence of such figures from art history as Goya, Velásquez and Picasso. The drawings depict a cast of characters shown in a variety of figurative and abstract styles, each revealing different aspects of identity, psychology and emotion.
A set of photographs by Louise Lawler (b.1947, USA) have also been acquired and will be on show, more than doubling Tate’s holdings of the artist. Lawler is renowned for her carefully cropped close-up images of famous works of art, often photographed at unexpected moments when coming on or off display, from a Roy Lichtenstein painting being hung in Chicago to a Jean Arp sculpture in storage in Hamburg.
The display also includes a recent sculpture by Richard Tuttle (b.1941, USA), one of the most important artists of his generation. Entitled System VI, White Traffic 2011, this is first freestanding sculpture by Tuttle to enter Tate’s collection and is made from a wide variety of humble and disposable materials – including fibre board, wire, foam and mesh – assembled in an abstract composition like a three-dimensional poem.
The Karpidas family have been benefactors of Tate for many years and have supported many acquisitions to the collection, such as the striking photographic screenprint Who owns what? 2012 by Barbara Kruger (b.1945, USA), which is also on display at Tate Modern. Other works which have entered Tate’s collection through the family’s support include several ceramic sculptures by Andrew Lord (b.1950, UK) and paintings by Piotr Janas (b.1970, Poland) and Sergej Jensen (b.1973, Denmark).
The display is adjacent to two other rooms showcasing newly acquired works. One is devoted to a group of plaster sculptures from the 1960s and 70s by Maria Bartuszová (1936–1996, Czechoslovakia), acquired this year with the support of the Edward and Agnès Lee Acquisition Fund. These join the Materials and Objects display, while the Media Networks display is joined by a large-scale installation of 102 screenprinted panels by Kelley Walker (b.1969, USA), acquired last year with the support of the Cranford Collection.
The new displays are open from 5 December 2016, admission free. They can be found at Tate Modern on Level 4 of the Boiler House, and are curated by senior curators Simon Baker and Mark Godfrey, curator Juliet Bingham and assistant curator Valentina Ravaglia.
