Open today at Tate Modern! ⛵✨🌙 Stitching together thousands of metal bottle tops and fragments, this year’s Hyundai Commission: #BehindTheRedMoon is a monumental sculptural installation by Ghanaian artist El Anatsui. Three majestic curtains of light and colour take us on a journey through the #TurbineHall, reflecting on the expanse of human history and the elemental power of the natural world. Each sculpture refers to Anatsui’s interest in the movement and migration of goods and people during the transatlantic slave trade. Viewed together from afar, Anatsui’s shimmering, mystical hangings reveal a landscape of symbols: the moon, the sail, the wave, the earth, and the wall. The first hanging, titled ‘The Red Moon’, resembles the sail of a ship billowing out in the wind, announcing the beginning of a journey across the Atlantic Ocean. Up close, the logos on the bottle tops speak of the material’s complex social histories, referencing a present-day industry built on colonial trade routes. Poignant and poetic, #ElAnatsui’s Hyundai Commission: Behind the Red Moon interweaves elemental forces with human histories of power, oppression, dispersion, survival and hope. #BehindTheRedMoon is free and open every day until 14 April 2024. In partnership with @hyundai.artlab

‘I love people wherever I go. Everything I have learned about art and finding out about art is because I’ve worked here.’ - Marcia Henderson Join us for a day in the life of Tate Security Officer and budding artist Marcia Henderson, as she takes us behind the scenes at Tate Britain. 🎨 🏛️

‘Funny, shocking and, genuinely, deeply insightful’ - Time Out NOW OPEN: Sarah Lucas is causing a stir with her new Tate Britain exhibition, #HAPPYGAS! 🫧 With bed-sized sandwiches, cars crafted from cigarettes and bulging bundles of breasts, HAPPY GAS is a wild ride through Lucas’s work over the last four decades — challenging our understanding of sex, class and gender at every turn. Mischievous and honest, #SarahLucas creates art that distorts everyday life and invites us to confront laughable and demeaning stereotypes. HAPPY GAS will leave you feeling joyful, energised and defiant. 🎟️ Open until 14 January 2024. As always, Members go free. Sarah Lucas: HAPPY GAS is supported by @burberry

😱 ‘Women in Revolt! Art and Activism in the UK 1970-1990’ opens tomorrow! For her 1977 work ‘3 Minute Scream’, musician, filmmaker and artist Gina Birch turned the camera on herself and recorded a full Super 8 cartridge of her screams. 🎥 Many feminist artists of the mid 1970s created work that pushed social boundaries, often using provocative material to challenge gender norms and embrace the ‘unfeminine’. ‘I came to London from Nottingham in 1976 to go to Hornsey college of Art. I was very soon immersed in what became punk and the world of 1970s politics of squatting, nuclear disarmament, Rock Against Racism and later Rock Against Sexism. The rundown city was our playground.’ At Hornsey, she met Ana de Silva and they formed the experimental punk band The Raincoats. The artist recalls, ‘It was a time of casual sexism, casual sex and more overt sexism’. 💥 Birch’s screams feature in #WomenInRevolt! Art and Activism in the UK 1970–1990, an exhibition of over 100 women artists who changed the face of British culture and paved the way for future generations. Open from tomorrow at Tate Britain. 📺: Gina Birch, 3 Minute Scream 1977 ©️ Gina Birch

'I'm excited about seeing things, and I'm interested in the way I think other people see things.' - Roy Lichtenstein 💥 Pop art pioneer #RoyLichtenstein believed the world could be expressed through abstract patterns. His bold, graphic style is immediately recognisable and still influences artists and designers today. Creating monumentally sized paintings with his signature hand-painted dots, his work was suggestive of the widespread and accelerating effects of popular mass culture. Lichtenstein’s 'Reflections' are a series of prints which the artist made towards the end of his life. The images are partly obscured by blocks of colour and pattern, all printed and collaged to the surface of the print, which simulate reflected streaks - as if behind glass or reflected by a mirror. To make the screenprints, Lichtenstein appropriated imagery from his past works - and particularly from comic books - returning to subject matter he had addressed in the 1960s. His approach in these reflection works can be read as a witty comment on the techniques of pop artists who themselves quoted and reused imagery found in popular culture, and perhaps an acknowledgement to his own lifetime of parodied pop art. 🟨 Find Lichtenstein's Reflections Series in a free @ARTISTROOMS display at Tate Modern. 🟡 Roy Lichtenstein, Reflections on Conversation, Reflections on Girl, Reflections on Scream, Reflections on Crash, Reflections on Minerva 1990 © Estate of Roy Lichtenstein/DACS 2023.

💐 In Amikam Toren's ongoing series 'Armchair Paintings' 1989, the artist buys oil paintings from charity shops or thrift stores and then cuts the text into the picture plane.  In this work, a picture of a vase of pastel coloured roses is incised with 'the fact of the matter is'. The canvas is suspended away from the support, so that the words appear in white, the shadows of the letters faintly visible through the incisions. The language is taken from different sources: graffiti, signage or overheard phrases, and the combination of text and image creates new meaning.  🖼️ Amikam Toren, Armchair Painting - Untitled (wallbound) 1991 @amikamtoren

One of the 20th century’s most captivating painters, #PhilipGuston restlessly made paintings and drawings that captured the anxious and turbulent world around him. His distinct use of colour with various shades, swirls and layers of pinks and complex brushwork makes his already mysterious, dream-like images even more striking. 🎨 Guston constantly pushed himself to evolve in new and different directions. He lived to paint, but also loved poetry, saying ‘the poets see without the jargon of art’. Moving between surrealism, abstraction and figuration, he developed his best-known style in the late 1960s and 1970s creating images of strange figures, piles of shoes, light bulbs, cigarettes and clocks. Guston painted these often many times, inspired by his time in his studio, life and childhood. On 24 November, join us for our free Tate Modern #TateLates for an exciting mix of artist-led workshops, live music and more to explore the influential work of Philip Guston. 🏭 🥂 See the full programme by clicking the link in our bio.

This painting is from George Shaw's ongoing series titled 'Scenes from the Passion.' 🌳 Shaw grew up in Tile Hill, a post-war housing estate on the south side of Coventry, where his parents still live. He decided to be an artist while he was still at school, but became disillusioned during his BA in fine art at Sheffield Polytechnic (1986-9) and abandoned art for a few years. He returned to it in 1996, completing an MA at the Royal College of Art in London. During this period, he made a trip back to his parents’ house and began photographing the landscape of his teenage years. 'I started to make these paintings out of a kind of mourning for the person I used to be: an enthusiastic, passionate teenager who read art books and novels and poems and biographies and watched films and TV and listened to music and dreamed. They are paintings of places that were familiar to me in my childhood and adolescence, places in which I found myself alone and thoughtful. They are places in which I forgot things. ... I paint the paintings of all the times and all the thoughts I lack the language to describe. For the one single moment that I can recall, I feel a dull sadness for the thousands I have forgotten.' 💙

'With the bottle caps, you have to break them up in order to recompose them, and try to make them stronger and more expansive – something that they couldn’t achieve on their own. If you bring things or people together, they become more powerful than they are individually.' - El Anatsui ✨ Crumpling, crushing, and stitching together thousands of metal bottle tops, this year’s Hyundai Commission: #BehindTheRedMoon is a monumental sculptural installation by Ghanaian artist El Anatsui. Three majestic curtains of light and colour take us on a journey through the #TurbineHall, reflecting on the expanse of human history and the elemental power of the natural world. Tate curator @OseiBonsu_ visited @ElAnatsui_Art in his studio in Ghana to talk about the artist's unique choice of materials, his environmental concerns, and how tradition can be a springboard for new ideas. ⛵🌙 Read the full interview by clicking the link in today's bio. ➡️

'Landscapes are not just physical spaces, they are imaginative spaces, and the imaginative space can be just as real.' - Jem Southam 💙 Southam’s photographs are generally the result of long, regular walks, mostly in the countryside of South West England. His first walks, in the mid-1970s, were partly inspired by the work of the land artist Richard Long (born 1945), as well as by the writing of the poet and novelist Laurie Lee (1914–1997). Since then, Southam has continued to experience the English landscape in a slow way, usually taking photographs of specific sites, which he progressively becomes attached to. His images are a response to a slow absorption and intimate knowledge of the place, a feeling of kinship with it, developed through visits and acquired knowledge, often through conversations with people who live in the area. 📷 Clevedon, Blind Yeo, 16th January 2000 📷 Senneville-sur-Fecamp, February 2006 📷 Rye Harbour, River Rother, 1 April 1999 📷 Les Petites Dalles, November 2006 📷 Brampford Speke 1998, printed 2003

From laden apple trees to yellowing leaves, autumn is often described as ‘the painter's season’ for its inspiration to generations of artists and writers. 🍂🍁🍂 Hope you feel inspired this weekend. 🧡 🌳 Thomas Gainsborough, Wooded Landscape c.1747 🐑 William Holman Hunt, Our English Coasts (‘Strayed Sheep’) 1852 🌝 Winifred Nicholson, The Hunter’s Moon 1955 ⛰️ Adrian Stokes, Autumn in the Mountains, 1903 🌊 Dame Ethel Walker, Seascape: Autumn Morning, c.1935 🍂 Ivon Hitchens, Damp Autumn, 1941 🍁 Sir Alfred East, Golden Autumn c.1900

Curious to know what our conservators do day-to-day? You’re in luck, it's #AskAConservator Day! ✨💛 With over 780 artworks on the gallery walls at any one time, Tate's conservation studio is an exciting place to be, with conservators from all areas of expertise cleaning, treating, restoring and preserving artworks - in both physical and digital format. Our collection of artworks spans five centuries, from 1545 to the work of artists today. The materials and techniques used to make such a variety of works vary enormously, from oil paint, canvas, marble and bronze to video, textiles, wood, light, rice, marble, sand, soap and even chocolate! 🍫🖼️ We met with the #Conservation team at Tate Britain to ask them your questions about the work they do at Tate! See our story for their responses. 🔍