The State We're In 2000–now

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).

Rene Matić, Lost Bike  2019, printed 2021

Rene Matić, Jenny and Zac Holding Hands  2019, printed 2021

Rene Matić, Rene in Sheringham  2019, printed 2021

Rene Matić, Rene and Dad I  2019, printed 2021

Rene Matić, VE Day, Skegness III  2020, printed 2021

Rene Matić, Rene at New Wave Tattoo  2020, printed 2021

Rene Matić, Mia and Cait Snogging I  2020, printed 2021

Rene Matić, Ione’s Shoes  2019, printed 2021

Rene Matić, Rudi at Christmas  2019, printed 2021

Rene Matić, Maggie in Morley’s  2020, printed 2021

Rene Matić, Chiddy Doing Rene’s Hair  2019, printed 2021

Rene Matić, Mia and Faith at BBQ  2019, printed 2021

Rene Matić, Clap for Carers  2020, printed 2021

Rene Matić, Skegness  2020, printed 2021

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.

Veronica Ryan OBE, Arrangement in Layers, Stacking Up Moments  2016–19

Arrangement in Layers, Stacking Up Moments comprises ten structures made of closely stacked layers of cardboard avocado trays, piled upwards or resting on their sides, and arranged in a loose grouping on the floor. Some of the trays are glued together. The artist cut a circle through each stack and created ‘tubes’, or sacs, that transect the trays and hold them together. These tubes are made of crochet structures, dyed in different colours and sewn to the stacks of trays. Some of them contain seeds.

Mohammed Sami, Electric Chair  2020

Electric Chair 2020 is a large painting in acrylic on linen. The subject of the work is an ornate, gilded chair against a dark blue background. The background is non-descript, giving the vacant chair a sense of being suspended in an unknown location and time, although its textured white fabric and carved gilt frame suggest wealth and power. Sami has cropped the image so that the arms and feet of the chair disappear beyond the edges of the painting. This close-up composition draws the viewer into the picture, the paintwork of which appears distressed and faded. A number of the artist’s paintings, most of which are devoid of people, depict chairs and other furnishings.

Partou Zia, 40 Nights and 40 Days  2008

Wolfgang Tillmans, The State We’re In, A  2015

The State We’re In, A, 2015 is an unframed inkjet print on paper. The photograph was taken from the end of a pier in Porto, Portugal using a high-resolution, full-format 35-mm digital camera, capturing a stark stretch of the Atlantic Ocean, where international time lines and borders intersect. The surface of the sea is agitated and ominous, the digital camera revealing in intense detail the topology of the water’s surface. This detail, in combination with the dark and moody colours of the Atlantic on a grey day and the imposing scale of the work, give it a brooding feeling of foreboding. Tate’s copy of the work is the only one in the edition, although an artist’s proof also exists.

Lubaina Himid CBE RA, H.M.S. Calcutta  2021

Oscar Murillo, Manifestation  2019–20

Manifestation combines oil paint, oil stick, cotton thread and graphite on a composite of canvas, velvet and linen stitched together by hand to form a single overall composition.The surface of the painting is flooded with oil paint and pigment which typifies Murillo’s painting process. This work was made in the artist’s studio in his hometown of La Paia, Colombia in lockdown during the coronavirus pandemic of 2020. It was first exhibited at the Hayward Gallery, London in 2021 in the exhibition Mixing it Up: Painting Today. It is characteristic of Murillo’s paintings in that it was made flat on his studio floor, in sections, over an extended period of time. There the fragments of canvas, velvet and linen acquired a patina of dirt, dust and other imprints of the ‘energy’ of the studio. Describing this process, Murillo has said: ‘The working environment is never tidied up, elements just shift and with time amalgamate. It is in this state of permanence that the work lies, like cooking a long red meat stew.’ (Quoted in Wood 2012, p.107.)

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.

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.

Kudzanai-Violet Hwami, Expiation  2021

Rene Matić, Maggie and Rene II  2019, printed 2021