Tate announces 2023 exhibition highlights

Tate today announces its programme of exhibitions for 2023. Two ground-breaking figures in modern art, Hilma af Klint and Piet Mondrian, will be shown together at Tate Modern, while the radical Rossetti generation will be presented in a new light at Tate Britain. Group exhibitions will explore the relationships between painting and photography, art and activism, and the past and the future, while major solo shows will be dedicated to Philip Guston, Isaac Julien and Sarah Lucas. Tate Members will be able to visit all these exhibitions for free and 16-25-year-olds can get £5 tickets by joining Tate Collective.

Tate Britain

Tate Britain’s first exhibition of the year will focus on The Rossettis. It will show how siblings Christina and Dante Gabriel Rossetti forged a counter-cultural circle in 19th Britain, inspired by new ideas about life, love, sex, society and art. This will be the largest exhibition of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s paintings in two decades and the first time all the surviving paintings and major works on paper by his wife Elizabeth (née Siddall) will be seen in public. In April it will be joined by an ambitious solo exhibition of work by Isaac Julien, one of the most important contemporary artists and filmmakers working today. It will reveal the scope of Julien’s pioneering work from the early 1980s through to his recent large-scale, multi-screen installations, which investigate the movement of peoples across different continents, times and spaces.

The autumn will see a career-spanning exhibition devoted to Sarah Lucas, an artist internationally celebrated for her bold and irreverent approach to British experiences of class, sex and gender. The show will cover the full scope of her work in sculpture, installation and photography, which deftly explores what makes us human and how objects are imbued with meaning. This will be followed by a landmark exhibition of over 100 women artists working in Britain in the 1970s and 80s. Women in Revolt! will foreground a generation of artists who worked largely outside the mainstream. Influenced by the slogan ‘the personal is political’, the exhibition will reassess their contribution to art history and their connection to events such as the equal pay act, Greenham Common, Rock Against Racism, Section 28 and the AIDS crisis.

Each season throughout the year Tate Britain Lates will activate the gallery out of hours and the ongoing Art Now series of free exhibitions will continue to celebrate emerging artistic talent.

Tate Modern

Tate Modern will begin the year with Hilma af Klint and Piet Mondrian. From early landscapes and flower paintings to celebrated abstract works – including many never before seen in the UK – this exhibition will reassess two pivotal figures in art history. It will reveal how their visual language of signs, shapes and colours was rooted in a shared fascination with the natural world and a desire to understand the forces behind life on earth.

A major group show will open in the summer, A World in Common: Contemporary African Photography, bringing together photographers of different generations from across Africa. It will explore how artists have reimagined the continent’s diverse cultures, histories and geographies – from bustling cityscapes to dream-like utopias – and how photography can allow the past and the future to co-exist in powerful and transformative ways. Also opening in the summer, Capturing the Moment will be a celebration of modern and contemporary painting, drawing on the rich holdings of the Yageo Foundation Collection. The exhibition will showcase how painters have captured moments in time on the canvas, and how painting and photography have influenced each other. It will feature artists spanning the last 80 years, from Andy Warhol, Jeff Wall and Lucian Freud to Michael Armitage, Louise Lawler and Nijdeka Akunyili Crosby.

In the autumn, Tate Modern will open a retrospective of one of the 20th century’s most captivating painters, Philip Guston. Over a 50-year career, Guston’s work responded to a world marked by turmoil, bridging the personal and the political, the abstract and the figurative, and the humorous and the tragic. This exhibition will be joined by the annual Hyundai Commission for which a new artist will be invited to transform the Turbine Hall at the heart of Tate Modern.

Throughout the year, Tate Modern Lates will continue on the last Friday of every month and UNIQLO Tate Play will offer an ever-changing programme of playful art-inspired activities for families of all ages.

Tate Liverpool

Tate Liverpool’s exhibition pairing JMW Turner with Lamin Fofana (opening this September) will continue into the spring of 2023. In the summer it will be joined by 12th edition of Liverpool Biennial, marking the 25th anniversary of the UK’s largest contemporary visual arts festival. Tate Liverpool will once again be a key venue for the biennial, which takes place across Liverpool’s public spaces, galleries and museums. Later in the year, work will begin on the ambitious transformation of Tate Liverpool led by 6a architects. While the building is being redeveloped, the gallery will stage pop-up projects and collaborative programmes in other locations across the city.

Tate St Ives

The upcoming exhibition Barbara Hepworth: Art and Life (opening this November) will continue at Tate St Ives into the new year. It will be followed in May 2023 by the UK’s first museum exhibition about the renowned Casablanca Art School. The show will explore the intense period of artistic rebirth that followed Morocco’s independence, driven by the School’s experimental teaching methods in the 1960s and 70s. Work by 21 artists will be brought together to demonstrate the wide variety of the Moroccan ‘new wave’, from vibrant abstract paintings and urban murals to applied arts, typography and design.

Turner Prize 2023

Towner Eastbourne will stage an exhibition of next year’s Turner Prize nominees as the centrepiece of the gallery’s centenary programme. The winner announcement will follow in December 2023 at the end of a year-long celebration of arts and culture across the town.