Tate Britain:
Collection Displays

The rehang of the Tate Britain Collection Displays is a once-in-a-decade project. In May 2023, Tate Britain opened its new displays of the world’s greatest collection of British art, comprising 800 works by over 350 artists across 38 galleries, dating 1500 to today. 

 

Displays include 100 works by JMW Turner, rooms devoted to William Blake, John Constable and Henry Moore, changing solo displays of ground-breaking artists like Annie Swynnerton, Aubrey Williams and Zineb Sedira, as well as stand-out works by contemporary artists including Hamad Butt, Damien Hirst, Mona Hatoum, Veronica Ryan and Paul Maheke.

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The curatorial intent of the new collection displays is to explore British art in its social context, revealing how artists responded to the cultural, political, economic and technological changes they lived through. The displays also relate British history to the rest of the world, and through commissioned interventions by contemporary artists, the displays reveal the parts of British history, the Empire and colonialism, that are not so visible in the collection.

Diversity - in terms of the stories told, and the artists represented - is key to the new displays. The galleries feature 200 newly acquired works, and women artists are better represented than ever before. Half the contemporary artists on display are women, from Bridget Riley and Tracey Emin to Kudzanai-Violet Hwami and Lydia Ourahmane, and the displays showcase great women artists from the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, including many who have never been shown at Tate before. 

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The new displays will continue to be updated to ensure that they remain relevant, with the commissioned contemporary interventions in the galleries changing over the next 10 years. Currently, these interventions engage in histories of enfranchisement and privatisation of common land, the English Civil War and the Transatlantic Slave Trade, the 1920s Harlem Renaissance in London and the rise of British African-Caribbean BBC radio and literature in the 1940s. Works by Turner are coupled with an intervention by Yuri Pattinson, which reflects the local atmosphere, to note the influence of pollution and a changing climate on Turner's skies.

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