Tate Modern: My Favourites

 

In the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern was a huge area covered in what looked like gravel. A few people had joked about it before I went, but no one said that it wasn’t gravel – it was millions of tiny handmade porcelain sunflower seeds! It was amazing!

Sunflower Seeds, by Ai Weiwei, is made up of 100 million unique life-sized sunflower seed husks. Each seed has been individually sculpted and painted by specialists working in small-scale workshops in the Chinese city of Jingdezhen.

Part of the description beside the work at the Tate said that “Sunflower Seeds invites us to look more closely at the ‘Made in China’ phenomenon and the geo-politics of cultural and economic exchange today.”

A video showed the whole process of the clay being dug from the mines, to the seeds being sculpted and painted, baked and shipped to Tate Modern. The people who made the seeds have been porcelain makers for thousand years, previously to the Emperor’s of China. They have less and less work as porcelain becomes less coveted, but they loved the new project (which they didn’t really understand) of making the seeds, and hoped that the artist would ask them to make something else for his works.

 

 

I loved all of David Shrigley’s works, they had quite a collection. Little ink and paper drawings all over the wall.

 

Franz Roh – Total Panic II, 1937 This is a collage of etchings that was in the surrealist gallery. Having said I don’t really like surrealism, I actually liked a lot of the works there. This was in a little frame on a wall of with lots of other small works.

 

Lee Krasner was the wife of Jackson Pollock, and she painted this after his death in a car accident. It is quite a large work in real life and full of emotion, and big sweeping strokes.

 

This is HUGE, and I love the colours merging into each other, and the thickness of the paint, and how it looks like someone has cut out a little square of an impressionist painting and blown it up to be two meters tall. I had the biggest urge to touch this one. I don’t think they appreciate that at the Tate though…

 

I always wished I could paint like this, with unrealistic/brighter colours and big blobby brushstrokes. Never quite managed it so I’ll just envy Derain’s portrait of Matisse instead. Go Fauvism!