Tate announces 2019 exhibition highlights

Pioneers, innovators and mavericks celebrated with major retrospectives

Tate today announced highlights of its 2019 exhibitions for all four Tate galleries in London, Liverpool and St Ives. The programme covers 200 years of groundbreaking art, from William Blake’s visionary paintings and prints to Otobong Nkanga’s thought-provoking installations and performances, and features major solo shows of artists from Asia, Africa, Europe and America. Radical figures who have challenged convention and redefined art-making will be celebrated across the year, including Olafur Eliasson, Natalia Goncharova, Keith Haring, Nam June Paik, Dorothea Tanning and Vincent van Gogh.

In January 2019, Tate Modern will open Pierre Bonnard: The Colour of Memory, showing how this innovative and much-loved French painter captured fleeting moments in time with his beautifully coloured landscapes and intimate domestic scenes. This will be followed by a survey of Franz West’s irreverent and playful sculptures, collages and installations in an exhibition specially designed by his friend and fellow artist Sarah Lucas. Tate Modern will also stage the first retrospective of Dorothea Tanning since her death in 2012, exploring how her dreamlike paintings and eerie soft sculptures challenged ideas about the body and identity over a career spanning seven decades.

Tate Britain’s landmark show The EY Exhibition: Van Gogh and Britain (announced earlier this year) will run alongside a retrospective of acclaimed photographer Don McCullin, featuring his powerful images of conflict in Vietnam, Northern Ireland and Syria as well as scenes of urban life and rural landscape in Britain. Tate St Ives will stage the UK’s first museum exhibition for Egyptian-Canadian artist of Armenian origin Anna Boghiguian, whose drawings, installations and books look at the intertwining of history, myth, philosophy and politics. The season will also see new contemporary works unveiled with the annual Tate Britain Commission for the Duveen Galleries and the third BMW Tate Live Exhibition in the Tanks at Tate Modern. Collaborative practice and experimentation will be at the heart of Tate Liverpool’s spring season with the fourth iteration of We Have Your Art Gallery.

In summer 2019 Tate’s programme brings together a wide variety of art forms, from stage and costume designs to immersive and interactive installations. Tate Liverpool will hold the UK’s first retrospective of Keith Haring, an artist and political activist whose iconic imagery is synonymous with the legendary New York art scene of the early 1980s taking inspiration from street and pop art. In addition, Berlin-based artist Sol Calero will make a large-scale new installation for the gallery. Tate Britain will showcase the vibrant abstract paintings of Frank Bowling in his first UK museum retrospective, covering the entirety of his long and distinguished career. Tate Modern will open two survey shows, both focusing on artists who have pushed the boundaries of art, worked across multiple disciplines and staged their work in innovative ways. The UK’s largest ever Natalia Goncharova exhibition will highlight her role as a leader of the Russian avant-garde and a trailblazing figure in painting and design. Icelandic-Danish artist Olafur Eliasson, renowned for his captivating installations like The weather project in 2003 and for his social and environmental projects like Little Sun, will return to Tate Modern for a large-scale exhibition and an outdoor artwork in July 2019.

The autumn sees a striking pairing of historic and contemporary artists at Tate Britain. The gallery’s first William Blake exhibition for a generation will take a bold new look at this radical and ambitious artist, who worked at a time of war, revolution and oppression. It will coincide with a major show of Turner Prize winner Mark Leckey’s explorations of pop culture and the digital world. Technological innovation will also be a key theme in Tate Modern’s spectacular Nam June Paik retrospective, revealing the Korean artist’s pivotal role in the birth of video and TV art around the world. The annual Hyundai Commission for Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall will also be unveiled in the autumn, as will the 2019 Turner Prize at Turner Contemporary in Margate, while Nigerian-born contemporary artist Otobong Nkanga will install new and existing works at Tate St Ives for her first solo museum exhibition in the UK.

Throughout the year, Tate Britain will continue its cutting-edge Art Now programme of free contemporary exhibitions, following recent shows by Lisa Brice, Marguerite Humeau and Rachel Maclean and this autumn’s show by Jesse Darling. Tate Modern’s regular film screenings will include premieres, artists’ talks and career-spanning retrospectives in the Starr Cinema, and Tate Exchange will continue investigating art’s value to society with its unique programme of collaborative projects. Further details of these will be announced in due course, alongside new displays, commissions and events across Tate’s galleries.