Exhibitions: Tate Modern and Wellcome Collection

Today I've seen Tacita Dean's photogenic FILM in the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern together with the Gerhard Richter retrospective before going to the Wellcome Collection for their Miracles and Charms exhibitions.

"FILM is an eleven-minute silent 35mm looped film projected onto a monolith standing 13 metres tall at the end of a darkened Turbine Hall ... FILM ... takes the appearance of a filmstrip with sprocket holes exposed onto the emulsion. The layering of imagery also conjures the transparency of a strip of celluloid, giving the appearance of being able to see through the screen itself to the wall of the Turbine Hall behind it. Playing with the distinctive architectural character of the east wall, FILM has the rhythm and metre of a visual poem. Images, some familiar from Dean’s previous works, such as lightning, trees and seascapes, juxtapose with panels of colour and interact with the grid structure of the wall. The resulting piece is a montage of black and white, colour and hand tinted images, including allusions to surrealist art, a Mondrian painting, and the mountains of René Daumal’s novel Mount Analogue and the Paramount Studio logo."

"Gerhard Richter: Panorama is a major retrospective exhibition that groups together significant moments of his remarkable career. Since the 1960s, Gerhard Richter has immersed himself in a rich and varied exploration of painting. Gerhard Richter: Panorama highlights the full extent of the artist's work, which has encompassed a diverse range of techniques and ideas. It includes realist paintings based on photographs, colourful gestural abstractions such as the squeegee paintings, portraits, subtle landscapes and history paintings."

"Wellcome Collection's autumn exhibition programme explores the extraordinary in the everyday with two shows: Infinitas Gracias: Mexican miracle paintings, the first major display of Mexican votive paintings outside Mexico; and Felicity Powell: Charmed Life, an exhibition of unseen London amulets from Henry Wellcome's collection, selected and arranged by the artist Felicity Powell. Drawing lines between faith, mortality and healing, Miracles and Charms offers a poignant insight into the tribulations of daily life and human responses to chance and suffering."

"Infinitas Gracias features over 100 votive paintings drawn from five collections held by museums in and around Mexico City and two sanctuaries located in mining communities in the Bajío region to the north: the city of Guanajuato and the distant mountain town of Real de Catorce. Together with images, news reports, photographs, devotional artefacts, film and interviews, the exhibition illustrates the depth of the votive tradition in Mexico."

"Charmed Life features some 400 amulets, selected by Felicity Powell from Henry Wellcome's vast collection, which will be exhibited encircled by ten works by the artist. The amulets, ranging from simple coins to meticulously carved shells and from dead animals to elaborately fashioned notes, are from a collection within a collection, amassed by the banker and obsessive folklorist Edward Lovett."

"Felicity Powell works in white wax in low relief on the backs of mirrors. Her figurative imagery is full of subtle and macabre humour. The heads she has modelled are always in the process of change, each is infused with metamorphic potential: growing antlers, extruding tentacles or coiffed with spaghetti; as though the known phyla have been infiltrated by subversive and impish genes. The images have the wonder and strangeness of exhibits from a cabinet of curiosities."

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Robert Plant & The Band Of Joy - Silver Rider.