Damien Hirst will be the subject of a major survey next summer at Tate Modern. It is bound to be a major draw for visitors attending the London Games.
The exhibition will show Hirst's earliest spot, spin and butterfly paintings and his shark in formaldehyde, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991). Large works, such as A Thousand Years – a vitrine containing a rotting cow's head, flies and an electric fly-killer – will also be shown.
According to Tate curator Ann Gallagher, it will give visitors the opportunity "to step back from the noise surrounding Hirst, look back to 1988 [the year he sprang on to the scene with his now famous exhibition Freeze] and follow his career through".
In a first for an art exhibition, a room will be devoted to an auction: the sale that the artist held of his own work at Sotheby's. Beautiful Inside My Head Forever, as he named the event, made £111m in September 2008, just as, across the Atlantic, Lehman Brothers bank was collapsing.
While a Briton occupies the major exhibition spaces, it is a London-born, German-raised artist, Tino Sehgal, who will make Tate Modern's 13th Turbine Hall installation. It will open in summer 2012 to coincide with the Olympics rather than during October, its customary slot.
Whereas many works in the Turbine Hall have been on a vast scale, Sehgal's work is likely to be intimate performance art involving personal interaction between visitors and actors. A previous work featured singing museum attendants; another, two performers enacting The Kiss by Rodin.
Tate Modern will host another likely blockbuster during the Games, a show devoted to Edvard Munch, drawing on recent research to present him as an emphatically modernist artist influenced by developments in technology, such as photography and cinema.
However, the £215m extension to Tate Modern, long promised in time for the Olympics, will be only partly complete, it is understood. Fundraising efforts have been slowed by the economic crisis, but, said Nicholas Serota, the director of the Tate: "We are completely confident that we will raise the full £215m required."
Tate Britain will also be pulling out all the stops during the Games. A major exhibition, Picasso and Britain, will examine the influence the artist had on British painters and sculptors. Specific Picassos will be paired with works by artists such as Henry Moore, Ben Nicholson and Francis Bacon. It will also show how the 1960 Picasso exhibition at the Tate Gallery profoundly influenced the work of the young David Hockney.
The museum will also host a major Pre-Raphaelite exhibition, focusing on the movement's social radicalism and giving new emphasis to the female artists associated with the Brotherhood.
Outside London, Tate Liverpool will host Turner Monet Twombly, examining the late periods of "three of the most significant artists of the past two centuries", according to director Christoph Grunenberg. Mature works by Turner and Monet will be juxtaposed with recent paintings and sculpture by the American artist Cy Twombly.
At St Ives the highlights will be a major exhibition of work by the long-established US painter Alex Katz, and a show devoted to one of Britain's most intriguing young artists, Cornish-born Simon Fujiwara.
Source
Guardian UK
