Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Razorbill 2020
14 rooms in Modern and Contemporary British Art
This final room in our five-century story of British art features artists of different generations working in Britain today. Some began exhibiting in the 1980s, while the youngest are in their twenties
All of these works were made in the last decade, mostly since 2020, and many are new to Tate’s collection. Our recent history has seen a succession of crises, ruptures and social justice movements in Britain and the world. These include the Brexit referendum, the Covid-19 pandemic, a cost-of-living crisis, the election of Donald Trump, Black Lives Matter, the #MeToo movement, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and civil wars in Syria, Sudan, Yemen and Afghanistan. Life today is increasingly shaped by the influence of digital technology, social media and the rise of AI. We continue to struggle with the planet-wide impact of the climate emergency.
Some of the artworks in this room allude to these critical events. Others open up spaces for broader reflections concerning community, difference and autonomy. Many speak to Black British experiences and histories of migration. Several centre the lives of Black women and queer people of colour – together or alone, real or imagined, joyful or defiant. Genres are redefined, as artists shift expressive abstract painting to reflect their own lived experience. Older histories sometimes reappear, such as the spectre of the Iraq War and the long decline of heavy industry in the UK.
The ocean is pictured here too. As an island nation with an extraordinarily global history, so much of British culture, society and art is shaped by our relationship to the sea.
Liz Johnson Artur, Time Don’t Run Here 2020
Time don’t run here forms part of what Artur calls her Black Balloon Archive. She has been making this vast ongoing body of work since the 1990s, depicting people in Africa, and of the African and Caribbean diasporas. Examples from the Archive are displayed here. ‘In my work, I like to talk to people, not about them. When people look at my work, they are actually looking at my audience. It’s them I would like to reach, but everyone else is invited too.’
Gallery label, November 2022
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artworks in The State We're In
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Razorbill 2020
Razorbill 2020 is a small-scale oil painting of a single female figure with closely cropped hair. Her mouth is open as though caught mid-speech or song. Her upper body is clothed in near black, with a feathered ruffle at the collar. Her right forearm and left elbow rest on a tabletop. The motif of the carnivalesque ruff is one that reappears in Yiadom-Boakye’s work from 2009 onwards, in a number of paintings titled with bird names such as Les Corbeaux 2018, Greenfinch 2012 and Skylark 2010. Razorbill is closely related to these in its tones but is markedly different in its shift towards the looser brushwork and warmer palette that characterises Yiadom-Boakye’s work of 2020.
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artworks in The State We're In
Mohammed Sami, Refugee Camp 2022
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artworks in The State We're In
Adam Farah-Saad, Two traumatised young men connect whilst roaming the city of London, helping each other to survive…(THE INNER CHILDREN MIX) 2023
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artworks in The State We're In
Partou Zia, 40 Nights and 40 Days 2008
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artworks in The State We're In
Rachel Jones, lick your teeth, they so clutch 2021
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.
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artworks in The State We're In
Paul Maheke, Mutual Survival, Lorde’s Manifesto 2015
Mutual Survival, Lorde’s Manifesto 2015 is a two-channel colour video installation presented on two floor-based forty-two-inch LED smart screens displayed leaning against a wall. The work’s title references the American Black feminist writer and activist Audre Lorde (1934–1992) whose words, borrowed and edited together from her essay ‘I am Your Sister’ published in 1985, caption the video intermittently. ‘As a people, we should most certainly work together to end our common oppression,’ the video subtitle begins. ‘We need to join our differences and articulate our particular strengths in the service of our mutual survivals.’ The work lasts seventeen minutes and fifteen seconds and exists in an edition of five. Tate’s copy is number one in the edition.
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artworks in The State We're In
Mike Nelson, The Asset Strippers (Elephant) 2019
The Asset Strippers (Elephant) 2019 is a large sculptural assemblage made from reclaimed industrial items and materials. It was made as part of Mike Nelson’s larger project The Asset Stripers, his response to the Tate Britain Commission for the Duveen Galleries in 2019. A brilliant blue lathe balances on two wooden timbers on top of a pair of blue trestles. At the top of the lathe sits a dark green anglepoise lamp without a bulb. Positioned alongside at floor level are assorted lathe parts. Three of the parts lie horizontally, two stand upright. Each has been carefully placed in the manner of an archeological artefact or sculptural object, rather than an industrial machine part. The lathe and its component parts are placed on five abutting cast concrete slabs that together resemble a low-level traditional sculptural plinth. The compositional treatment of the parts, together with the monochromatic colour scheme, is reminiscent of British modernist sculpture, in particular the industrial assemblages of Anthony Caro (1924–2013). However, unlike much of Caro’s work, The Asset Strippers (Elephant) has not been painted or surface-treated. The patina of age and use of its reclaimed parts are visible in areas of rusting and traces of oil. Two other assemblages from The Asset Strippers are also in Tate’s collection: The Asset Strippers (Heygate stack, equivalent for a lost estate) 2019 (Tate T15412) and Double Drill (No. 15) 2019 (Tate T15411).
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artworks in The State We're In
Art in this room
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Nicole Wermers
The Violet Revs
2016
Liz Johnson Artur
Time Don’t Run Here
2020
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Lubaina Himid CBE RA
H.M.S. Calcutta
2021
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye
Razorbill
2020
Mohammed Sami
Refugee Camp
2022
Adam Farah-Saad
Two traumatised young men connect whilst roaming the city of London, helping each other to survive…(THE INNER CHILDREN MIX)
2023
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