Tate Modern Mugs

One Blackfriars Skyscraper View From Tate Modern

Scene over Tate Modern and Thames

The Weather Project by Olafur Eliasson, 2003. This installation focused on how the British like to discuss the weather. What looked like a complete sun was actually only half a circle. The top half was the reflection of the bottom half in a mirror that stretched along the entire length of the ceiling. Monochromatic light was used to eliminate all colour and spurts of mist added to the atmosphere. Photographed in the Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, London, UK.

Breathtaking view of Millennium Bridge on river Thames, London from Tate Modern.

Breathtaking view of river Thames, London from Tate Modern

Simplistic skill spectator shows simple self shapes.

Kraftwerk illustration

While drawing I discover what I really want to say. If people only knew how hard I work to gain my mastery. It wouldn't seem so wonderful at all. Art is a line around your thoughts. Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get the work done. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you're not going to make an awful lot of work. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It’s self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. Painting from nature is not copying the object, it's realising one's sensations.

The Cuban-born sculptor Pardo created this piece for the 2006 Biennial and it is arguably the largest piece of public art in the city centre. In Homer’s Odyssey Penelope was Ulysses’ wife. Penelope faithfully awaited her husband’s return from the Trojan war. She put off numerous suitors by saying she had to finish weaving a robe, unravelling her day’s work each night to maintain her fidelity. The stalks are references to both Penelope’s weaving and to the local history of rope-making.

This composition is a prime example Mondrian’s astonishingly limited visual language. It consists of just horizontal and vertical lines in black, with planes of white and the three primary colours, from which all other colours are derived by mixing. The structure, the order of the elements in a coherent whole and the pure colour were meant to suggest an ethical view of society. Each individual element and the configuration to which it contributes were intended to symbolise the relationship between the individual and the collective, or the universal. Gallery label, Tate Modern, November 2015