CURRENT EXHIBITION

Rothko

September 21, 2008—February 1, 2009

Mark Rothko (1903-1970) is one of America’s most significant post-war painters. This exhibition will be an unprecedented exploration of his late series of work. At the centre of the exhibition will be a group of 15 Seagram murals uniting for the first time Tate’s group of nine murals - known as the Rothko room - with a selection of murals from the collections of Kawamura Memorial Art Museum, Japan and the National Gallery, Washington. The exhibition will take these works as a starting point for a critical investigation into Rothko’s approach to painting and the murals will be complemented by a group of related large-scale gouaches as well as archival material related to the inception of Tate’s Rothko room. The artist’s so-called Blackform paintings, his large-scale works on paper and his final series of Black on Grey paintings from the late 1960s, will all feature prominently in the exhibition. These works challenge standard preconceptions of Rothko as a painter focused primarily on the effect of colour.

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