Head of a Man

1965, F.N. Souza

Head of a Man is an oil painting on hardboard by the Indian artist F.N. Souza. As its title suggests, the painting depicts a man’s head rendered in thick black impasto on a black background. The style of painting is expressionist, with bold, energetic brush and palette knife strokes forming thick outlines that define the contours of the man’s shoulders and his face, as well as his facial characteristics, such as the large eyes, nose, lips and ears. Regarding his choice of the colour black, Souza stated in 1966: ‘Black is the most mysterious of all colours. Renoir found it impossible and said a spot of black was like a hole in the painting. I cannot agree: colour is now disturbing in a bad way’ (quoted in Grosvenor Gallery 2013, p.46).

I Present Your Royal Highness

2018, Jadé Fadojutimi

Each of Fadojutimi's works sits between abstraction and figuration. The artist shifts between gestures and repeated forms to produce her own distinctive visual language. I Present Your Royal Highness is an exploration of the artist's self. Its title is a knowing nod to the role ego plays in individual expression. Fadojutimi's work explores the fluid nature of identity in relation to the world that shapes it. Her dynamic surfaces capture an ever-evolving landscape of emotions. She likens her paintings to a diary of her experience.

Gallery label, May 2021

lick your teeth, they so clutch

2021, Rachel Jones

lick your teeth, they so clutch 2020 is a large-scale landscape-format painting in oil stick on canvas. Like Jones’s earlier paintings, it employs a kaleidoscopic palette and boldness of form typical of her work. Here, fiery reds collide with fleshy pinks and acid yellows against the counterbalancing coolness of blues and greens, contributing to the sense of tension created by the competing forms and the interplay of textures. Jones’s characteristic use of oil sticks as her medium allows her to create an intensity of pigment, layering colour and melding different textural layers that result in a tactile painted surface suggestive of a physical, embodied and intuitive approach to mark-making.

Manifestation

2019–20, Oscar Murillo

Manifestation combines oil paint, oil stick, cotton thread and graphite on a composite of canvas, velvet and linen stitched together by hand to form a single overall composition.

Untitled

1992–3, Zahoor ul Akhlaq

This is one of five small paintings on board in Tate’s collection by the Pakistani artist Zahoor ul Akhlaq (see Tate T14308–T14312). Dating from 1992–3, they are from a sequence of works based on the format of the takhti, a small wooden slate still used in Pakistan in rural or traditional schools for children to write on, wipe clean and reuse. All five paintings were made during a period in Akhlaq’s career when he travelled extensively: having spent time at Yale University in the United States on a Fulbright Fellowship (1987–9), he taught at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey (1992–3) before moving to Toronto, Canada from 1993–7. Due in part to the lack of a permanent studio, he used acrylic rather than oil paint and often worked on a small scale.

Jersey

2008, Hurvin Anderson

Jersey depicts the interior of a barbershop in Kingsland, Jamaica. Anderson was born in the UK to parents of West Indian descent. His paintings evoke a sense of, as he puts it, ‘being in one place but thinking about another’. While the photographic sources provide a degree of distance, the process of compiling the image allows for a play of memory and perception, and a shift of register between representation and abstraction.

Gallery label, September 2016

The Generosity

2010, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye

Yiadom-Boakye’s portraits are fuelled by her interest in the history of figurative painting. Her work can perhaps also be seen as a critique of this history, addressing the absence of black subjects in western European and North American portraiture. She emphasises that her ‘starting point is always the language of painting itself and how that relates to the subject matter’. Her characters are imaginary, rather than based on specific individuals. She constructs deliberately ambiguous scenes for them, encouraging us to project our own meaning on to the work.

Gallery label, May 2019

Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows

exhibited 1831, John Constable

This stormy painting is thought to reflect John Constable’s worries about the effect of political reform on the Anglican Church. The subject was suggested by his close friend John Fisher, an Archdeacon who lived in Salisbury. The storm may also represent Constable’s grief following the death of his wife, Maria. When he first exhibited this painting in 1831, debates about political reform were intensifying. The rainbow may have been added later, however, suggesting the storm is passing.

Gallery label, August 2024

Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth

1889, John Singer Sargent

Ellen Terry was a celebrated British actor, particularly known for playing Shakespearean roles. John Singer Sargent was struck by her appearance at the opening night of a production of Macbeth in 1888. He persuaded Terry to sit for a portrait in the character of Lady Macbeth, inventing the dramatic pose seen here, which did not occur in the production. The pose showcases Terry’s extraordinary dress, designed by Alice Comyns Carr. The flecks of cobalt blue represent the wings of jewel beetles that were stitched into the dress.

Gallery label, January 2025

Sunrise with Sea Monsters

c.1845, Joseph Mallord William Turner

This is one of Turner’s most mysterious unfinished paintings. The shapes of two or more giant fish can be seen against a yellow sunrise. Dark brown hatched lines to the left of the fish may suggest netting or fish scales. Turner would have read of sightings and stories of mysterious marine creatures by sailors engaged in Britain’s multiplying naval business interests. Despite its bright tonality, this work may relate to Turner’s frequent depictions of the sea as dark place.

Gallery label, October 2023

Nocturne: Blue and Silver - Chelsea

1871, James Abbott McNeill Whistler

Whistler painted this view from Battersea Bridge looking across the Thames towards Chelsea. The tower of Chelsea Old Church is just visible on the right, and a fisherman stands in the foreground looking out to a low barge. It was the first of Whistler’s series of nocturnes: paintings intended to convey a sense of the beauty and tranquillity of the River Thames in the evening or by night. The influence of Japanese woodblock prints is evident from the relatively small range of colours and the butterfly device at the lower centre, which Whistler used as his signature.

Gallery label, November 2016

Swinging

1925, Wassily Kandinsky

The title ‘Swinging’ captures this work’s sense of movement. Kandinsky believed painting should aim to be as abstract as music. He worked to create art that was free from all references to the material world. For him, colour in particular was essential for liberating art from representing the visible world.

Gallery label, August 2019

Frederick and Jessie Etchells Painting

1912, Vanessa Bell

Here we see artists Jessie and Frederick Etchells at work, with doors opening behind them onto a garden. Vanessa Bell painted the sister and brother when they visited her at Asheham House in Sussex. She focused on her use of colour and form, choosing not to include the pair’s facial features. Bell thought Jessie ‘a nice character … and very silent’ but found Frederick difficult and their visit was a strain. From 1913, both Jessie and Frederick worked for the Omega Workshops, an interior design project set up by painter Roger Fry and co-directed by Bell.

Gallery label, August 2024

Triptych

1963, Sonia Delaunay

A pioneer of abstraction and an innovator in the fields of fashion, interior decoration, architecture and advertising, Sonia Delaunay’s career spanned much of the twentieth century. Her early abstract paintings attempted to capture the dynamism of the modern city and she continued to experiment with abstraction throughout her life. In Triptych, made in her late seventies, she set herself the challenge of introducing a white area in the centre of the work, making it more difficult to create a unity between the three sections. She wrote this work ‘opened up new vistas for me’.

Gallery label, February 2016

Some Roses and Their Phantoms

1952, Dorothea Tanning

In this painting Tanning questions our expectations of still life painting, transforming a domestic table-top scene. Tanning plays with perspective and introduces mysterious forms and an insect-like creature. She wrote: ‘Here some roses from a very different garden sit?, lie?, stand?, gasp?, dream?, die? – on white linen. They may serve you tea or coffee. As I saw them take shape on the canvas I was amazed by their solemn colours and their quiet mystery that called for – seemed to demand – some sort of phantoms.’

Gallery label, August 2019

Waterfall

1943, Arshile Gorky

Gorky was born in Armenia, but was forced to flee Turkish persecution, and in 1920 settled in the USA. His early work was strongly influenced by Pablo Picasso and the European Surrealists. In the summer of 1942, Gorky spent three weeks in Connecticut making drawings from nature. He went on to produce a series of paintings that refer to natural forms. In this painting, amorphous shapes and drips of liquid paint suggest the fluidity of the waterfall.

Gallery label, August 2004

Number 23

1948, Jackson Pollock

Pollock began to drip and pour paint in 1947. This work, in which streams of black and white enamels were poured onto the surface, shows the improvisatory possibilities of this method. The sweeping arc of Pollock's gesture can be seen in the liquid black, which has bled into the white painted background to become grey. This acts as a base over which the thicker white paint is deliberately woven. The effect is rhythmic but controlled, energetic but delicate. Although there was an element of chance, Pollock frequently emphasised the importance of decisions over the merely accidental.

Gallery label, July 2008

Horizontal Stripe Painting : November 1957 - January 1958

1957–8, Patrick Heron

Heron was a critic and painter who championed an approach to painting that assessed quality according to such formal values as the flatness of a composition and colour. Of his stripe paintings he wrote, ‘The reason why the stripes sufficed ... was precisely that they were so very uncomplicated as shapes ... the emptier the general format was, the more exclusive the concentration upon the experiences of colour itself.’ Heron resisted the total abandoning of subject matter and even such works as this have been seen in relation to landscape, the horizontal bands and colours perhaps suggesting the horizon at sunset.

Gallery label, February 2010

A Bigger Splash

1967, David Hockney

David Hockney moved to Los Angeles from London in 1964. This is one of several paintings he made of swimming pools there. It would become a defining image of sun-lit, clean-contoured southern California. Hockney was interested in using paint to capture fleeting moments. He explained: ‘When you photograph a splash, you’re freezing a moment and it becomes something else. I realise that a splash could never be seen this way in real life, it happens too quickly. And I was amused by this, so I painted it in a very, very slow way.’

Gallery label, September 2023

Mirror

1964–6, Sir Frank Bowling OBE RA

Frank Bowling explained that Mirror was ‘about making a painting’. He combined different approaches to figurative and abstract work, from op art to colour field painting. At the centre is the spiral staircase at the painting studios of the Royal College of Art, where he had studied. Bowling appears swinging from the top of the staircase and again at the bottom, painted in a very different way. In between stands his then-wife, writer Paddy Kitchen. In 1966, feeling increasingly pigeon-holed as a Black artist, Bowling left London for New York.

Gallery label, September 2023

Sacha Jason Guyana Dreams

1989, Sir Frank Bowling OBE RA

In 1989 Bowling returned to Guyana with his son, Sacha. During this visit Bowling realised that his 1980s abstract paintings evoking the Thames and English landscape traditions, also referenced his birthplace. The light on the coastal mud banks of Guyana had apparently had an abiding, unconscious influence on his work. He asked Sacha to look over the sea wall in search of a connection to his painting. Sure enough, his son saw in ‘this heat haze where everything looks flat... what I had been doing in my art... there it was, visible to any ordinary eye’.

Gallery label, January 2022

They Always Appear

1964, Ibrahim El-Salahi

El-Salahi gave the title They Always Appear to a series of paintings that explore the visual potential of bringing together a language of images traditionally perceived as Arab and African. In this painting, West African masks appear alongside calligraphic lines. El-Salahi developed a distinctive visual language based on the motifs and symbols that surrounded him in Sudan. This style became known as the ‘Khartoum School,’ as El Salahi and his contemporaries attempted to construct a visual language for a united Sudanese identity.

Gallery label, October 2022

Inspiration from the sea

1963, Ramses Younan

Younan was an artist, writer and political activist. In the late 1930s he co-founded the Egyptian surrealist group Art and Freedom. He believed in the revolutionary power of the imagination, and used the unconscious mind as a source for his art. Starting from an initial improvisation he would develop and refine the surface of his paintings to produce complex abstract compositions. Here forms seem to dissolve and merge into each other. The colours resemble those of an Egyptian landscape.

Gallery label, January 2019

WORK62-W

1962, Minoru Onoda

Onoda Minoru was part of the second generation of Gutai artists. He began making paintings using dots of various sizes and colours in 1961. Onoda described these as ‘propagation paintings’. For him, the systematic repetition of dots was a way to think mechanically. Through this technique, he hoped to counter the subjectivity of action-based painting. Onoda was also responding to the industrialisation of Japan during the post-war period. He found inspiration in the ‘vast meaninglessness’ of machine-made, identically duplicated objects.

Gallery label, December 2020

Chessmen One

1961, Anwar Jalal Shemza

The painting Chessmen One depicts four horizontal rows of black chess pieces which increase in height from the top down. They are set against a lightly textured pale blue background. Each row of chessmen is decorated with sinuous linear detail in different colours, red on the top row, blue on the second, cream on the third and green on the fourth. Each horizontal division between the rows is painted in one of these colours. The chessmen are depicted in a schematic, near abstract frontal view that emphasises the flatness and two-dimensional surface of the canvas.

The Affair

1987–8, Bhajan Hunjan

Hunjan notes that her work is ‘about my experiences, women, and in particular Asian women’. She often depicts the subjects of her paintings partially screened behind wood, metal or foliage. For the artist, these compositions signify the degrees of physical and mental enclosure felt by South Asian women in the UK who struggle to express themselves while conforming to social expectations and cultural conventions. Alongside her art practice and role organising exhibitions, Hunjan worked with a South Asian women’s refuge in Reading and ran community art groups and workshops for school children. She discussed this work in Spare Rib, stating, ‘I’m there as a role model for someone who might want to express themselves just a little, I can’t resolve anything, but I can sow a seed.’

Gallery label, November 2023