Heimo Zobernig and the Tate Collection

This exhibition at Tate St Ives will be the first time Austrian artist Heimo Zobernig (born1958) has been shown in the UK. One of the most significant artists working in Europe today, over the last 25 years he has exhibited extensively all over the world creating a considerable body of work that includes sculpture, video, painting, installation, architectural intervention and performance. He has collaborated with artists including Martin Kippenberger, Albert Oehlen and Franz West and was included in documenta X, documenta XI and the 49th Venice Biennale. The exhibition will tour to the Centro de Arte Moderna at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon in February 2009.

Much of Zobernig’s work critically engages with various modern art movements, including abstraction, constructivism, minimalism, post-minimalism and conceptual art, as well as with architecture, design and theatre. He appropriates various art histories in order to question the ideological position and conditions which underpin them, subverting and reinterpreting them with a lightness of touch and an economy of material, means and methodology that is at turns playful, dry, witty, unsettling and disarming.

This exhibition includes important works made by Zobernig over the last 25 years, as well as a number of new interventions into both the architecture of the galleries here at Tate St Ives, and the Tate collection. Alongside his own works, the exhibition will bring together a diverse range of key works from the Tate collection, specially selected by the artist. Drawn from the last 300 years they will include works by Pablo Picasso, Carl Andre, Henry Moore, Ad Reinhardt, Oskar Kokoschka, James Webb, Henry Wallis, Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Marcel Duchamp and Kurt Schwitters. In addition, works by the St Ives moderns are also included – from Patrick Heron, Barbara Hepworth and Naum Gabo to Terry Frost, Roger Hilton and Karl Weschke. Through their dynamic integration and juxtaposition with Zobernig’s own works, and through his critical framing and display design, the collection works will be presented in a radically reconfigured context, producing an exhilarating, challenging and unorthodox display.

Working in collaboration with the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon, the exhibition at Tate St Ives will include several additional loans from the Gulbenkian's holdings. In February 2009 the show, and several loans from the Tate collection, will move to Lisbon where Zobernig's works will be reconfigured for the very different spaces of the Centro de Arte Moderna José de Azeredo Perdigão (CAMJAP) and will engage with the wider context of the Gulbenkian Collection.

A substantial catalogue covering both shows will be published shortly after the opening at CAMJAP in Lisbon. It will include installation shots of both exhibitions and will feature new essays by Jürgen Bock, Juliane Rebentisch, Bart van der Heide, Jessica Morgan and Liam Gillick.