Artist Rooms collection to tour 30-plus UK venues over the next three years
Locations will include Wolverhampton and Hull
The Artist Rooms national collection of contemporary art will tour more than 30 UK locations over the next three years, it was announced today.
The collection, which is owned jointly by Tate and the National Galleries of Scotland, numbers more than 1600 items, including artworks by Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and Agnes Martin.
Artist Rooms began in 2008 when art dealer Anthony d’Offay made a gift of works by 32 international contemporary artists, and has since grown through loans and gifts from artists, their representatives, and the Artist Rooms Foundation.
It was also announced today that the 40th artist to be represented in the collection will be Phyllida Barlow. The work she donated, untitled: upturnedhouse, 2, made in 2012, is now on display at Tate Modern.
At a press conference, John Leighton, the director-general of the National Galleries of Scotland, said that Artist Rooms was a “truly national” collection that enabled contemporary art to be experienced by younger and wider audiences “far from metropolitan centres”, and that it was difficult to comprehend its cumulative impact.
Since 2009, Artist Rooms artworks have been shown in 76 UK museums and galleries, in locations including Shetland and Penzance.
Using funding from the Art Fund and Arts Council England, the collection will continue touring for a further three years, appearing in exhibitions at more than 30 venues, beginning with a Roy Lichtenstein exhibition at Wolverhampton Art Gallery this autumn. Artworks from the collection will also be shown at Ferens Art Gallery in Hull. Further details will be announced at a later date.
Nicholas Serota, the director of Tate, said that the Artist Rooms collection had given millions of people the opportunity to see high quality art, sometimes in “very small venues”.
He added that one of the challenges of the next five years would be preserving regional museums, galleries and arts centres. “All of us will need to work with local authorities to sustain these very, very valuable local resources for communities,” he said.
Culture secretary Ed Vaizey said that local authority investment in culture and heritage would be addressed in a forthcoming government white paper on the arts. He said: “there is more that we can do as a government in terms of supporting the work great museums and art centres do with young people.”
The new Tate Modern building, set to open in June, will include a permanent gallery dedicated to displaying the Artist Rooms collection. The first artist to be exhibited will be Louise Bourgeois, who was also the first artist to have work displayed at Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall in 2000.
Frances Morris, the director of collection for international art at Tate, said that Bourgeois was “the perfect artist to encapsulate so much of what we wanted to achieve at Tate Modern”. She added that the gallery aimed to bring female artists and artists from other parts of the world “out of the shadow”.
On this point, Anthony D’Offay said that it was “incredibly important that girls have the opportunity to see the work of great women artists”.
The collection, which is owned jointly by Tate and the National Galleries of Scotland, numbers more than 1600 items, including artworks by Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and Agnes Martin.
Artist Rooms began in 2008 when art dealer Anthony d’Offay made a gift of works by 32 international contemporary artists, and has since grown through loans and gifts from artists, their representatives, and the Artist Rooms Foundation.
It was also announced today that the 40th artist to be represented in the collection will be Phyllida Barlow. The work she donated, untitled: upturnedhouse, 2, made in 2012, is now on display at Tate Modern.
At a press conference, John Leighton, the director-general of the National Galleries of Scotland, said that Artist Rooms was a “truly national” collection that enabled contemporary art to be experienced by younger and wider audiences “far from metropolitan centres”, and that it was difficult to comprehend its cumulative impact.
Since 2009, Artist Rooms artworks have been shown in 76 UK museums and galleries, in locations including Shetland and Penzance.
Using funding from the Art Fund and Arts Council England, the collection will continue touring for a further three years, appearing in exhibitions at more than 30 venues, beginning with a Roy Lichtenstein exhibition at Wolverhampton Art Gallery this autumn. Artworks from the collection will also be shown at Ferens Art Gallery in Hull. Further details will be announced at a later date.
Nicholas Serota, the director of Tate, said that the Artist Rooms collection had given millions of people the opportunity to see high quality art, sometimes in “very small venues”.
He added that one of the challenges of the next five years would be preserving regional museums, galleries and arts centres. “All of us will need to work with local authorities to sustain these very, very valuable local resources for communities,” he said.
Culture secretary Ed Vaizey said that local authority investment in culture and heritage would be addressed in a forthcoming government white paper on the arts. He said: “there is more that we can do as a government in terms of supporting the work great museums and art centres do with young people.”
The new Tate Modern building, set to open in June, will include a permanent gallery dedicated to displaying the Artist Rooms collection. The first artist to be exhibited will be Louise Bourgeois, who was also the first artist to have work displayed at Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall in 2000.
Frances Morris, the director of collection for international art at Tate, said that Bourgeois was “the perfect artist to encapsulate so much of what we wanted to achieve at Tate Modern”. She added that the gallery aimed to bring female artists and artists from other parts of the world “out of the shadow”.
On this point, Anthony D’Offay said that it was “incredibly important that girls have the opportunity to see the work of great women artists”.