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Tate Modern

  • Art
  • Bankside
  • price 0 of 4
  • 5 out of 5 stars
  • Recommended
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Time Out says

5 out of 5 stars

The Tate Modern is one of London - and the world’s - most iconic art galleries. As well as having an international collection of modern and contemporary artworks that few can beat, it's a historic piece of architecture worth visiting in its own right. It’s hard to imagine how empty London’s modern art scene must have been before this place opened, but we’re sure glad it did. Tate Modern is one of four Tate venues in the UK, and it welcomes a stonking 5 million visitors through its doors each year.

The gallery opened in 2000, making use of the old Bankside Power Station. The imposing structure on the banks of the Thames was designed after WWII by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, the same architect behind Battersea Power Station. It was converted by Herzog & de Meuron, who returned to oversee a massive extension project. This started with the opening of the Tanks in 2012, and ended with the brand-new Switch House extension in 2016.

The twisted pyramid-like structure marked the most significant new opening of a cultural institution since the British Library on Euston Road. Like the rest of Tate Modern, it’s well worth having a gander at its super-stylish outside - but for the real treats, you need to head indoors. The Switch House gave Tate Modern an additional 60% of space, and they’ve used it wisely. Their international focus means their collection of over 800 works are by artists hailing from over 50 different countries. They’ve also tackled the gender debate in a much more pro-active way than most art galleries, with their solo displays split 50-50 between male and female artists.

Along with their permanent collection (featuring big names including Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and Barbara Hepworth), Tate Modern’s blockbuster temporary exhibitions never fail to pull in the crowds.

Details

Address:
Bankside
London
SE1 9TG
Transport:
Tube: Southwark/Blackfriars
Price:
Free (permanent collection); admission charge applies for some temporary exhibitions
Opening hours:
Mon-Sun 10am-6pm (last adm 5:30pm)
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What’s on

Yoko Ono: ‘Music of the Mind’

  • 4 out of 5 stars

It’s all in your mind, a figment of your imagination, and that’s how Yoko Ono wants it. The pioneering nonagenarian conceptualist – whose life’s work has been unfairly eclipsed by her Beatles-adjacent fame – wants to plant a seed in your brain, and that’s it. That’s the art. At its best, her art is simple, direct, and, when she started doing it in the mid-1950s, absolutely revolutionary. Ono moved to New York from Japan, rented a loft, and let the ideas win. In the fertile experimental atmosphere of that city at that time, surrounded by like-minded creatives including John Cage, George Maciunas, David Tudor and the incredible LaMonte Young, Ono went about changing art.  She did it with performances and instructions. The opening walls here are lined with note cards, each with a simple order: ‘light a match and watch till it goes out’, ‘let a vine grow, water every day’, ‘draw line, erase line’, ‘polish an orange’. Some instructions are meant to be performed, others (like ‘go on transforming a square canvas in your head until it becomes a circle’) exist only in your mind. Conceptualism had existed in some form since Duchamp and his urinal, maybe even since Gustave Courbet if you wanted to argue that way, but this is Ono getting rid of all the stuff of art, all the colour, the form, the physical reality, and leaving behind only the idea. It’s powerful, incredible, smart, beautiful. A final video shows Yoko in a trilby screaming and making funny noises Performance was essential

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