The Engine

Damien Hirst Thursday 5 April – Sunday 9 September 2012 Press release: 3 March 2011 Press Release 3 March 2011 Damien Hirst 5 April – 9 September 2012 (Press view: 3 April 2012) Sponsored by the Qatar Museums Authority Tate Modern Open every day from 10.00 – 18.00 and late until 22.00 on Friday and Saturday For public information number please print 020 7887 8888 In 2012, Tate Modern will present the first substantial survey of Damien Hirst’s work ever held in the UK. Hirst is widely regarded as one of the most important artists working today and has created some of the most iconic works in recent history. This exhibition will provide a journey through two decades of Hirst’s inventive practice. Damien Hirst first came to public attention in London in 1988 when he conceived and curated Freeze, an exhibition of his own work and that of his friends and fellow Goldsmiths College students, staged in a disused London warehouse. In the nearly quarter of a century since that pivotal show, Hir...

Edvard Munch: The Modern Eye Press release: 4 March 2011 Edvard Munch: The Modern Eye is a major exhibition which will radically reassess the work of Norwegian painter Edvard Munch (1863-1944). It will propose a ground breaking dialogue between the artist’s paintings and drawings made in the first half of the 20th century and his often overlooked interest in the rise of other media during that time, including photography, film and the re-birth of stage production. Few other modern artists are better known and yet less understood than Munch. He is often presented primarily as a 19th century painter, a Symbolist or a pre-Expressionist, but this exhibition will aim to show instead how he emphatically engaged with 20th century concerns that were thoroughly representative of the modernity of the age. It will feature around sixty carefully-selected paintings and fifty photographs, alongside his lesser-known filmic work. These will reveal Munch’s interest in current affairs and how his paint...

Watercolour Tate Britain Linbury Galleries Wednesday 16 February – Sunday 21 August 2011 Admission £12.70/£14.00 with Gift Aid ( £10.90/£12.00 with Gift Aid concessions) Public information number: 020 7887 8888. Press release: 14 February 2011  Tate Britain presents a fresh assessment of the history of watercolour painting in Britain from the Middle Ages through to the present day. This major exhibition shows over 200 works including pieces by historic artists such as William Blake, Thomas Girtin and JMW Turner, through to modern and contemporary artists including Patrick Heron, Peter Doig and Tracey Emin. Spanning 800 years and celebrating the variety of ways watercolour has been used, it shows how important the medium is within British art. Drawing out a grand history which traces the origins of watercolour back to medieval illuminated manuscripts, the exhibition reassesses the commonly held belief that the medium first flourished during a ‘golden age’ of British watercolo...

Joan Miro: THE LADDER OF ESCAPE: Tate Modern: April 2011  Joan Miro (1893-1983) is the least known of Spain’s twentieth-century triumvirate of great artists: Picasso, Dali, Miro. This is the first retrospective of Miro in London since 1964, quite a long time then since any notable interest in Miro’s work, but now he is clearly a part of history rather than making it. Miro’s career straddled two centuries, born in the late 19th century but living into the latter part of the twentieth, he witnessed the great conflagration of the Spanish Civil War but also the Great War and WW2.  The Spanish Civil War (1936-39) and Miro’s response to it shaped his career as it did Picasso’s and Dali’s to a lesser extent. Furthermore his career went on after the fall of the Republic and his subsequent exile. Miro’s approach to art was to dissolve his own formal constraints once he had attained them, therefore his work passed through a kind of negative evolution from complexity to utter si...