Turner's Picturesque Travels: Engraved Views of Britain

4 March-September 2002

This was the first display in the Clore Gallery to focus on Turner's engravings since the exhibition Colour Into Line, Turner and the Art of Engraving in 1989. Following a geographical arrangement, the display showed engravings representing the breadth of Turner's travels around Great Britain. Comparative material included sketchbooks and published volumes. The display was curated by Sarah Taft and Nicola Moorby of the Prints and Drawings Rooms.

Brice Marden and Turner

4 March-Mid July 2002

This small display in the Clore Gallery continued the series begun by last year's Darren Almond room examining the work of a modern or contemporary artist in relation to Turner. Brice Marden is well represented in the Tate Collection by several portfolios of etchings acquired in the 1970s. Selected prints have been placed alongside a number of late Turner watercolours in order to illuminate parallel methods: mainly a shared concern with art as a means of receiving and transmitting the energies of nature. The work of both artists also revealed a preoccupation with sublime and transcendental aesthetics, as well as poetic allusion and embedded meaning. Process emerged as another area of comparison, with a concern for order and control set against gestures of automatism and spontaneity such as notations of colour in the case of Turner's watercolours, or a calligraphic use of spit bite and aquatint in Marden's prints.

The display has been curated by Alison Smith.

Christmas Tree 2002

13 December - 5 January 2003

Supported by Clifton Nurseries

Designed by Tracey Emin
Curated by Lizzie Carey-Thomas

A Century of Artists' Film in Britain

May 2003 - April 2004

Illuminations production for Tate, with the support of Tate Members, Central St Martins College of Art and Design, the AHRB Centre for British Film & Television Studies, the LUX and the British Film Institute.

This ambitious display of 170 works by 130 artists aimed for the first time to reveal the full range, variety and originality of artists' film and video throughout their history, from films made close to the cinema's birth in the 1890s to work realised at the start of the twenty-first century. Many of the works had not been seen before in a gallery context, and some had not been seen publicly since their first screenings. The display was presented in four day-long sequences. The films and videos had been clustered in shorter thematic and historical programmes. Some programmes suggest continuities of interest and approach across generations: film's ability to encapsulate the everyday and to mimic memory; the challenges of portraiture and the creation of visual music. Other programmes reflect the ways in which artists have explored video and film at particular moments: the early 1970s, when conceptual film-making emerged and, in parallel, artists at the London Film-Makers Co-op focused on the materials of their medium; the 1930s, when a committed avant-garde worked on the margins of the mainstream industry; and the early 1990s, as artists began to respond to the possibilities of digital editing. The display was curated by David Curtis, Senior Research Fellow, AHRB Centre for British Film & Television Studies.

Christmas Tree 2003 Populus Tremula

12 December 2003 - 6 January 2004

For the Christmas Tree this year, Mark Wallinger filled the space of the Rotunda with a real, leafless aspen, decorated with mass-produced Catholic rosaries. According to legend, it was wood from the aspen tree (scientific name: populus tremula) that was used to make the cross on which Christ was crucified. Rosaries are designed to assist in meditative prayer. Wallinger's tree thus combined strongly symbolic elements, redolent of death, rebirth and ritual. Characteristically, the artist did not provide easy answers to the questions his tree raised or try to dictate our response to such heady symbolism.

Designed by Mark Wallinger
Curated by Martin Myrone