Queens and Kings

2017, Zohra Opoku

Queens and Kings continues Opoku’s series WHO IS WEARING MY T-SHIRT, exploring the impact of textile waste in Ghana. Screenprinted onto a patchwork of used fabrics, the composition includes the artist and her siblings standing around piles of garments. With leaves and branches disguising their faces, the figures wear second-hand T-shirts and kente cloth passed down by their father, Asante Chief Nana Opoku Guyabaah II of Asato, Volta Region. Kente cloth is a handwoven fabric made from silk and cotton. It was originally produced to dress kings and their courts and is often worn on special occasions. Opoku’s work explores ‘how various types of dress culture are inspired by different social influences’. Through her fabric combinations, she invites us to consider the ways tradition and globalisation intersect in contemporary Ghana.

Gallery label, June 2023

Drypoint - Ocean Surface

1983, Vija Celmins

Drypoint – Ocean Surface is a small, one-colour drypoint engraving of ocean waves in black ink on white Arches Satine paper. It was printed and published by Gemini G.E.L. (Graphic Editions Limited) in Los Angeles in an edition of seventy-five with twelve artist’s proofs, in collaboration with master printer Doris Simmelink. The copy held by ARTIST ROOMS is artist’s proof number 3/12. Artist’s proofs are identical in appearance to the numbered edition but are usually printed beforehand with the artist and publisher retaining most, if not all, of these proofs.

Archipelago - Red and Blue

1966, Birgit Skiöld

Ocelot Head

1968, Axel Amuchastegui

The Enraged Musician

1741, William Hogarth

The streets of London were a throng of noise and activity. Various street hawkers would cry out to advertise their goods and attract buyers, while ballad singers and street musicians entertained the passing crowd. William Hogarth shows the frustration of a violinist as he is driven to distraction by the cacophony outside his window.

Gallery label, August 2024

‘Songs of Innocence and of Experience’: ‘Spring’

1794, reprinted 1831 or later, William Blake

These are pages from Blake's illustrated book Songs of Innocence. The artist composed the verse and designed and printed the pages. He developed a technique for integrating both text and image onto a single etching plate for printing. This reflects the intimate relationship he saw between image and text, each being a comment upon the other. The influence of Blake's work as a writer and illustrator persisted, and he became an important model for modern artists such as Paul Nash.

Gallery label, August 2004

Still Life with Very Fine Hatching

1933, Giorgio Morandi

From a very early stage, Morandi committed himself to still life subjects. He used a stock of bottles, jugs, tins and boxes that he kept in his studio and worked from over a period of almost fifty years. The way light objects press up against dark in Still Life with Very Fine Hatching is emphasised by the close-up viewpoint. All distractions are excluded. The everyday container becomes an object of contemplation, a vessel for the viewer's own imagination.

Gallery label, August 2004

Girl with a Fig Leaf

1947, Lucian Freud

This etching has a surreal quality typical of Lucian Freud’s early portraits. He frequently emphasised the large, almond-shaped eyes of his wife, Kathleen Garman. Freud drew the image using a line and dot technique he developed in the 1940s. Each element is differentiated by the type of etched marks: dots for the face, wiry etched lines for the hair and rounded lines and dots for the fingers. The shape of the leaf is modelled with blank and etched areas.

Gallery label, September 2023

Large Bear

1961, Lucy Qinnuayuak, Eegyvudluk Pootoogook

Explosion

1965–6, Roy Lichtenstein

Beginning in 1962 Lichtenstein borrowed images of explosions from popular war comics for use in his paintings. The subject embodies the revolutionary nature of Pop art and suggests the very real threat of annihilation by nuclear explosion that was prevalent at that time (the Cuban Missile Crisis occurred in 1962). But Lichtenstein was also interested in the way dynamic events like explosions were depicted in the stylised format of comic book illustration. This print incorporates many of the hallmarks of his early painting style: flat primary colours, Benday dots, outlines and schematic drawing.

Gallery label, September 2004

Elizabeth I

1966, Gerhard Richter

Black Bean

1968, Andy Warhol

Warhol painted familiar consumer items such as coca-cola bottles or soup cans throughout the 1960s, the earliest examples first shown in New York in 1962. Asked why he painted soup cans, Warhol replied, 'Because I used to drink it. I used to have the same lunch every day.' Using screenprinting, Warhol could simulate the mechanical effect of his source to the extent that the resulting image appears almost untransformed. Yet, the rich colour, enlargement of scale and unifying black outline are reminders that these are commercial techniques being used in the context of high art, no longer selling products, but presenting them as objects for contemplation. As such, they pose radical questions about the value of art and the way it is consumed.

Gallery label, August 2004

Red Aquatint

1972, Kim Lim

Nightingale

1974, Parviz Tanavoli

#4

1978, Richard Diebenkorn

This is an abstract image with residual landscape features. It relates to Diebenkorn's 'Ocean Park' paintings, an extended series of pictures made between 1967 and the late 1980s, eventually numbering well over one hundred works. An important inspiration for the series were the near abstract paintings of Matisse, made between 1909 and 1916. Diebenkorn's images depict tilted-up perspectives of suburban views, criss-crossed with roadways, found on the West Coast of America where the artist lived for many years. The prints of this series, while recalling the abstract shapes and lines of Diebenkorn's paintings, are complete works in their own right. In their modest scale, they relate closely to his drawings and studies for compositions.

Gallery label, September 2004

[no title]

1979–82, Jenny Holzer

If There is No Struggle, There is No Progress - Uprisings

1981, Chila Kumari Singh Burman MBE

This work was made in direct response to the 1981 uprisings, as young people across England clashed with police over ongoing racial discrimination and violence. Significant protests took place across Birmingham, Leeds, Liverpool, London, Manchester and Nottingham. Burman highlights areas of these cities where uprisings took place. The artist includes an image of a police officer wearing a gas mask, which features in other works she made at the same time. This motif likely references the police use of CS gas grenades to disperse protestors in Toxteth, Liverpool – the first time these had been used in the UK outside of Northern Ireland.

Gallery label, November 2023

Love, Sex and Romance

1984, Rita Keegan

Keegan's work responds to her extensive family archive dating back to the 1880s. Here, Keegan employs images and fragments from this archive to create monoprint collages. The artist describes her practice as a response to ‘a feminist perspective' of 'putting yourself in the picture’. In talking about her process, Keegan explains: ‘I've always felt that to tear somebody's face can be quite violent, but if you're doing that to your own face, you've given yourself permission, so it's no longer a violent act. It's a deconstructive act. It's a way of looking.’ This work was made in 1984, the same year Keegan co-founded Copy Art, a community space for artists working with computers and photocopiers.

Gallery label, November 2023

Fête

1989, Bridget Riley

Fête is a screenprint featuring a highly colourful, abstract composition within a white border. The composition comprises twenty vertical bands each separated into numerous coloured sections. These sections vary in length and form parallelograms of different sizes. While the longer coloured parallelograms primarily look vertical in orientation, the smallest ones appear to cut diagonally across the upright bands. Where these latter shapes run into each other across adjacent columns and are identical in colour they also appear to form longer diagonal strips running in front of the vertical columns. The work features a wide range of even, unmodulated colours, with no discernible pattern to their organisation. The print is signed and dated in its bottom-right corner and at the bottom-left are written the title and the numbers ‘21 / 60’, which indicate that this print is number twenty-one in an edition of sixty.

OK (State I)

1990, Edward Ruscha

OK (Slate I) is a lithograph with the word ‘OK’ at its centre. The letters are a peach-orange colour and the background is blue. The background takes a pure shade of blue in the region immediately above and below the letters, while the section behind the letters has a purple hue. There is also purple along the top and bottom edges of the piece. The letters, meanwhile, are a darker shade of peach at their centre than at their top and bottom. Small tendrils of the text’s peach-orange colour extend beyond the edge of the text and mingle with the blue of the background. This gives the letters a fuzzy-looking effect. The lithograph was made by Ruscha in 1990, but it is a technique he has used throughout his career. Lithography allows images and text to be printed quickly and can be used to produce dozens of identical images.

The Supper

1991, Belkis Ayón

La Cena derives from stories about the initiation banquets of the secret Afro-Cuban brotherhood, Abakuá. Belkis Ayón positions Princess Sikán as the central figure. Unembellished, she stands out from the intricately decorated figures around her, subtly challenging the male-dominated nature of the Abakuá society. Ayón weaves symbols stemming from multiple belief systems into her visual vocabulary. The composition references Christian imagery of the Last Supper, while the background patterns relate to nsibidi, a form of writing developed in Nigeria by the Ekpe secret society – a precursor to Abakuá.

Gallery label, September 2024

Catfish Envy

1993, Masami Teraoka

Japanese-born Masami Teraoka combines the influences of traditional Japanese art forms and American Pop art, exploiting the cultural and temporal disparities between the traditional style and the contemporary issues and ideas which form his subject matter. After training with traditional Japanese masters, Teraoka moved to Los Angeles to study Western art in 1961. From the 1970s, he began painting watercolours, and later prints, which mimicked the appearance of ukiyo-e, Japanese woodblock prints of the Edo Period (1615-1868). In these works, he creates scenes using characters from Kabuki theatre, geisha and samurai, recreating the characteristic dramatic landscapes of the prints, and incorporating cartouches and calligraphy. Teraoka draws on an affinity between these ‘floating world’ prints, which were mass-produced for an emerging bourgeois market, and the work of the Pop artists, who celebrated mass-production and low forms of culture.

Grain Weevil

2000, Yinka Shonibare CBE

Yinka Shonibare's arabesque lithograph, Grain Weevil, depicts a beetle that damages stored grain by boring into it in order to deposit its eggs. A glossy beetle is silhouetted against a matt orange background which is criss-crossed by curving black lines. The white spots that spread over the surface of the print are suggestive of both contamination and insect eggs. Shonibare's print is one of a portfolio of ten prints collectively entitled Bugs. The portfolio was published by the Byam Shaw School of Art in London. Produced as a fundraiser, the proceeds from the portfolio sales were dedicated to providing bursaries to support Byam Shaw students from overseas, particularly those from Latin America, Eastern Europe, Africa and India. The works in the portfolio use various printmaking processes and share an insect theme which has been interpreted in diverse ways. The theme was set by the school principal, Alister Warman. Originally intended to refer specifically to insects found in London, it was conceived of as a sequel to another print portfolio published by the school in 1994, Nine London Birds. The decorative treatment deployed by a number of the artists involved contrasts with a subject matter commonly regarded as repugnant. Similarly, Mark Wallinger's King Edward and the Colorado Beetle refers to crop destruction. The Colorado beetle of the title is a small, yellow American beetle whose larva is exceedingly destructive to the potato. Wallinger's potato print uses as its medium the potential victim of the insect. The image of the beetle is repeated five times on the print, with the strongest print at the centre surrounded by increasingly weaker prints. The arrangement of the beetles suggests that these five represent only a tiny section of an endlessly repeating pattern, hinting at the overwhelmingly profuse aspect of the insect world. In Fiona Banner's etching, Swarm, an amorphous cloud of impenetrable blackness hovers against a white background. It is like a black hole teeming with insects. The print eloquently conveys the unquantifiable and unbounded nature of the insect realm. Anya Gallaccio's contribution, a silver gelatin print entitled Spider's Leg at 400x, invokes the spirit of scientific enquiry. Reminiscent of how often a child's first encounter with a microscope prompts a search for dead insects to magnify, Gallaccio's print presents an unsettlingly close-up view of a spider's leg. Small hairs metamorphose into an otherworldly, densely forested landscape. Other prints focus on the uneasy relationship between insects and humans. Peter Doig's etching, Kings Cross Mosquito, is an image of night-time menace. Under the cover of darkness, a mosquito perches on a hairy section of exposed skin. The mosquito's belly is a deep blood red, suggesting that it has already gorged on the available flesh. Kathy Prendergast's Mittens and Moth Eggs invokes the discreet, noiseless destruction of a bug infestation. A pair of knitted gloves has been eaten by moths and shows signs of disintegration. In Tacita Dean's Wasp, a reviled insect is granted a formal grace. It is photographed on a car windscreen among the raindrops which are beyond the reach of the wipers. The bright lights of the road are blurred by the droplets into brilliant pools of light. Amid this dazzling light, the wasp glows like a small piece of amber. In Cornelia Parker's The Spider that Died in the Tower of London, the creature is magnified to fill the frame of the print. Set against a pale blue background, we are confronted with the remains of a spider which, if attended to at all, would ordinarily be swept up and disposed of without ceremony. This is consistent with Parker's familiar strategy of evoking the hidden stories of overlooked objects, thus transforming their status. Brad Lochore's print, Night Moth, presents the orange glow of a household lamp giving way to darkness on all sides. The shapes conjured by the contrast of light and shadow suggest the outline of fluttering wings. Finally, Gavin Turk's lithograph, Metamorphosis, is accompanied by a short text: 'As he awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed into a gigantic insect.' Quoting Kafka, Turk presents a comically anthropomorphized insect, standing upright on two legs, with arms poised as if about to reach for a pair of pistols in a bizarre insectoid shoot-out. This boxed portfolio of prints exists in an edition of ninety, of which this is number twenty-one. It is presented in a portfolio box with title page and colophon. Further reading:Yinka Shonibare, exhibition catalogue, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham 1999. Helen DelaneyJanuary 2002

Slate Drawing Two

2002, Richard Long CBE

This is one of a suite of four screenprints (see Tate P78717 and P78719-20) Long made from direct contact with the surfaces of slabs of slate and limestone. Slate Drawing Two, as its title indicates, is based on a pencil rubbing taken from textured slate. The drawing was turned into a screenprint using a photo-separation process and printed using repeated additions of ink until the image had reached the tonal balance required by the artist. The portfolio was printed by Advanced Graphics, London and published by Ridinghouse Editions, London, in an edition of forty plus ten artist’s proofs. Tate’s copy is the seventh in the edition.

Letters from Home

2004, Zarina Hashmi

This series of prints is based on letters written by the artist’s sister who lived in Pakistan. Lines of handwritten prose in Urdu are overlaid and obscured with maps and blueprints of distant homes and places. The letters mark significant moments – the death of a parent, for instance – and some of the prints bear impressions of places relevant to their estranged lives. Hashmi maps and conveys the experience of loss and dispossession due to political conflict. The break with the Urdu literary culture of undivided India is poignant for the artist who was born in Aligarh, a university town and centre of learning.

Gallery label, April 2013

Fighting One’s Self

2016, Virginia Chihota

This is one of two screenprints in Tate’s collection by Virginia Chihota that share the same title and date; where this one is portrait format, the other (Tate T14806) is landscape format. Both prints are unique and therefore not editioned, and form part of an ongoing series of monoprints – five at the time of writing – with the collective title Fighting One’s Self (‘Kuzvirwisa’ in the artist’s native Shona language). The title and images communicate varying aesthetic approaches to the theme of mental and physical isolation. Though created in series, the works are considered individual and can be displayed as such. This particular print is notable for the aqueous application of typically viscous screenprinter’s ink, producing a watercolour-like effect. The cool palette is predominantly blue and purple, overlaid by thin washes of red. Only toward the left-hand margin can one discern filaments of the boldest red hue for which Chihota’s earlier works are known. Large concentric ovals of blue, purple and pale red form egg-like layers, within which a figure shields its face from view. The landscape-format work is dominated by luminous gold ink, suspended in the centre of which is a large sac-like form positioned along its horizontal axis. The ovoid shape contains a human figure whose small black face and torso recede in relation to the flexed arm and disproportionately elongated leg, both articulated in taupe. The warm pink tones surrounding the figure are accented by two small striated Y-shapes rendered in blood red, evoking a uterine environment. The composition of both prints bears strong allusions to fertility, the placement of the human figure within such a sac being intentionally womb-like.

Remain, Thriving

2018, Njideka Akunyili Crosby

Made for Brixton Underground station, this scene imagines a gathering of the grandchildren of the ‘Windrush generation’ who moved to Britain following the 1948 British Nationality Act. The patterned walls, radiogram and hanging pictures are reminiscent of ‘front rooms’ they may associate with their grandparents. The wall imagery derives from photography in Brixton’s Black Cultural Archives, Including portraits of Dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson and activist Olive Morris. The scene is not simply celebratory: 2018 news of the Windrush scandal’s deportation of commonwealth citizens plays on television.

Gallery label, January 2022

Government Lover

2018, Rory Pilgrim

Government Lover 2018 is a hand-painted poster on paper made by Rory Pilgrim in close collaboration with Sheffield-based poster maker David Andrews. It – and another related poster, Energise Me 2019 (Tate T15587), also in Tate’s collection – relates to the artist’s eleven-track collaborative music video album and installation Software Garden 2018 (Tate T15585). The posters can be presented as banners hanging from the ceiling of the Software Garden installation space or separately hung on a wall. They bear poetic phrases from the lyrics featured in Software Garden. Here the text reads: ‘Government Lover, Intimacy is Freedom, My Freedom is Your Freedom, My Freedom Defends yours’.

Boating Scene 1.2.2

2019, Tishan Hsu

is a large-scale wall-hung work incorporating a distorted family photograph of a family in a rowing boat taken during the Cultural Revolution in China. The image has been printed on an aluminium sheet to which Hsu has attached twelve fluorescent green computer chip shapes made of silicone.

Lithic Verses

2020, Hera Büyüktaşcıyan

This is one of a group of five works on paper collectively entitled Lithic Verses 2020 by Hera Büyüktaşçıyan. They are based on found archival photographs that have been digitally reprinted and cropped and combined with the artists’ own frottage (where pencil is used to rub over a rough surface beneath the paper) to create spectral archaeological or architectural formations, isolated against a stark white background. The archival images were sourced from the German Archaeological Institute online archives, which document excavations from the late 1800s of Pergamon – the pre-Hellenistic city, situated in modern-day Turkey, that has been repeatedly raided and rebuilt throughout history.