Tate St Ives

This trip to St Ives was our first in nearly five years, so it was great to get back to the Tate, which has been completely rehung and expanded since the last time we visited it. The exhibition space now extends back into the hillside, giving the gallery much more flexibility for specific shows (such as Beatriz Milhazes) and more space for their permanent collection. The building itself remains a wonderful oddity created from the remains of an former gasworks, with echos of its shape including the rotunda that forms the heart of the gallery.

The current hang of the collection is based around the idea of ‘Modern Conversations’, the first ‘Making Art Modern’ looks at the artists who congregated in West Cornwall around the middle of the last century. In 1928, London-based artists Ben Nicholson and Christopher “Kit” Wood made a visit to St Ives, where they encountered by chance the work of local, retired mariner and artist Alfred Wallis. When the Second World War broke out, many artists fled London to escape the bombing. Margaret Mellis and Adrian Stokes were the first to make the move to St Ives, and they were soon joined by Nicholson and his second wife, the renowned British sculptor Barbara Hepworth, and the Russian Constructivist sculptor Naum Gabo. They developed new styles and were influenced by the self-taught Alfred Wallis. Artists such as Christopher Wood, Denis Mitchell, Margaret Mellis and Wilhelmina Barns-Graham were each inspired by Wallis’s unusual materials, techniques and simplified images, creating abstract paintings and sculptures in unorthodox ways.

The second room looks the landscape and the environment and their place in the modern movements.

‘In the 20th century, manufacturing, technology and transport dramatically transformed how people lived and worked. Growing cities and industrialisation altered surroundings forever. Some artists responded with radical approaches that broke away from traditional painting and sculpture. The artists shown here were influenced by developments in fields such as science, politics and philosophy. They borrowed from these to investigate our environments and how we understand them. Their works question and reflect on our modern relationships with landscapes, sometimes going beyond what we can recognise or see.’ Tate Curators

The next room is centred around the totemic sculpture by Barbara Hepworth, with many of the works in this room challenge the ‘desirable’ representations of the figure. Pieces by David Hockney, Keith Vaughan and Simon Bayliss draw on a queer sensibility, often ignored or suppressed or marginalised like the gay artists who came before those on display. This is followed by a look at spirituality, centred on more abstract or dream-like works. The artists explore mystical realms to examine spirituality and identity. Some use art as part of magic rituals that attempt to transport us to alternative worlds

The curved galleries that surround the central Rotunda space examine modern forms and thresholds, the former looking at works that strip back representations of the world to minimal line, colour and form. They reflect aspirations to reinvent societies after the turmoil and destruction of World War Two. Downstairs, the threshold of the coast, where the land meets the sea and the horizon, where the sea meets the sky are represented. The coastline around St Ives is a vital space for creative exploration. The ever-shifting boundary between land, ocean, and sky has inspired artists interested in communicating transitions in their lives, art, and society.

‘This room centres on the practice of Cornwall-based artist Ro Robertson. Their installation Interlude responds to the tidal zone of Porthmeor Beach and the changing shoreline between the headlands of The Island and Carrick Du (opposite this gallery). Robertson has approached the landscape through the lens of LGBTQIA+ experience, commenting ‘we are part of a diverse natural world in constant flux where boundaries aren’t binary and rigid but rather flow in constant harmony’.’

In the final space are five of Mark Rothko’s Seagram murals. Rothko visited Cornwall, invited by artist Peter Lanyon, and met many like-minded artists including Alan Davie, Paul Feiler and Terry Frost, some who feature in Tate St Ives’s current displays. On his return to the United States, Rothko decided that the restaurant would not be an appropriate location for his painting, and he donated nine of them to the Tate in 1959.

‘I am interested only in expressing basic human emotions – tragedy, ecstasy, doom’ Mark Rothko

Presented, as the artist intended, in a single space with reduced light, these works offer a meditative conclusion to the exhibitions and displays at Tate St Ives.