Tate is an institution that houses, in a network of four art galleries, the United Kingdom's national collection of British art, and international modern and contemporary art. It is not a government institution, but its main sponsor is the UK Department for Culture, Media and Sport.
Roger Eliot Fry was an English painter and critic, and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Establishing his reputation as a scholar of the Old Masters, he became an advocate of more recent developments in French painting, to which he gave the name Post-Impressionism. He was the first figure to raise public awareness of modern art in Britain, and emphasised the formal properties of paintings over the "associated ideas" conjured in the viewer by their representational content. He was described by the art historian Kenneth Clark as "incomparably the greatest influence on taste since Ruskin ... In so far as taste can be changed by one man, it was changed by Roger Fry". The taste Fry influenced was primarily that of the Anglophone world, and his success lay largely in alerting an educated public to a compelling version of recent artistic developments of the Parisian avant-garde.
Layla Rosalind Nashashibi is a Palestinian-English artist based in London. Nashashibi works mainly with 16 mm film but also makes paintings and prints. Her work often deals with everyday observations merged with mythological elements, considering the relationships and moments between community and extended family.
Sir Nicholas Andrew Serota is a British art historian and curator. He has been chairman of Arts Council England since February 2017.
Michael Kelley was an American artist whose work involved found objects, textile banners, drawings, assemblage, collage, performance, photography, sound and video. He also worked on curatorial projects; collaborated with many other artists and musicians; and left a formidable body of critical and creative writing. He often worked collaboratively and had produced projects with artists Paul McCarthy, Tony Oursler, and John Miller. Writing in The New York Times, in 2012, Holland Cotter described the artist as "one of the most influential American artists of the past quarter century and a pungent commentator on American class, popular culture and youthful rebellion."
Liam Gillick is a British artist who lives and works in New York City. Gillick deploys multiple forms to make visible the aesthetics of the constructed world and examine the ideological control systems that have emerged along with globalization and neoliberalism. He utilizes materials that resemble everyday built environments, transforming them into minimalist abstractions that deliver commentaries on social constructs, while also exploring notions of modernism.
Frieze Art Fair is an annual contemporary art fair first held in 2003 in London's Regent's Park. Developed by the founders of the contemporary art magazine Frieze, the fair has since expanded to include editions in four cities, in addition to acquiring several other art fairs. Following the original Frieze Art Fair, the fair added Frieze Masters (2012), also in London, dedicated to art made before the year 2000; Frieze New York (2012); Frieze Los Angeles (2019); and Frieze Seoul (2022). In 2023, Frieze acquired The Armory Show in New York, and EXPO Chicago.
RoseLee Goldberg is an art historian, author, critic and curator of performance art. She is most well known as being the founder and director of Performa, a performance art organisation. She is also currently a Clinical Associate Professor of Arts Administration at New York University.
Mark Bradford is an American visual artist. Bradford was born, lives, and works in Los Angeles and studied at the California Institute of the Arts. Recognized for his collaged painting works, which have been shown internationally, his practice also encompasses video, print, and installation. Bradford was the U.S. representative for the 2017 Venice Biennale. He was included in Time Magazine’s list of the 100 Most Influential People in 2021.
Dame Ethel Walker was a Scottish painter of portraits, flower-pieces, sea-pieces and decorative compositions. From 1936, Walker was a member of The London Group. Her work displays the influence of Impressionism, Puvis de Chavannes, Gauguin and Asian art. Walker achieved considerable success throughout her career, becoming the first female member elected to the New English Art Club in 1900. Walker's works were exhibited widely during her lifetime, at the Royal Academy, the Royal Society of Arts and at the Lefevre Gallery. She represented Britain at the Venice Biennale four times, in 1922, 1924, 1928 and 1930. Although Walker proclaimed that 'there is no such thing as a woman artist. There are only two kinds of artist — bad and good', she was elected Honorary President of the Women's International Art Club in 1932. Soon after her death, she was the subject of a major retrospective at the Tate in 1951 alongside Gwen John and Frances Hodgkins. Walker is now acknowledged as a lesbian artist, a fact which critics have noted is boldly apparent in her preference for women sitters and female nudes. It has been suggested that Walker was one of the earliest lesbian artists to explore her sexuality openly in her works. While Walker was contemporarily regarded as one of the foremost British women artists, her influence diminished after her death, perhaps due in part to her celebration of female sexuality. Made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1943, Walker was one of only four women artists to receive the honour as of 2010.
Matthew Higgs is an English artist, curator, writer and publisher. His contribution to UK contemporary art has included the creation of Imprint 93, a series of artists’ editions featuring the work of artists such as Martin Creed and Jeremy Deller. During the 1990s he promoted artists outside the Young British Artists mainstream of the period.
Nathaniel Mellors is an English contemporary artist and musician.
Timothy Hyman was a British figurative painter, art writer and curator. He published monographs on both Sienese Painting and on Pierre Bonnard, as well as most recently The World New Made: Figurative Painting in the Twentieth Century. He wrote extensively on art and film, was a regular contributor to The Times Literary Supplement (TLS) and curated exhibitions at the Tate, Institute of Contemporary Arts and Hayward galleries. Hyman was a portraitist but is best known for his narrative renditions of London. Drawing inspiration from artists such as Max Beckmann and Bonnard, as well as Lorenzetti and Brueghel, he explored his personal relationship, both real and mythological, with the city where he lived and worked. He employed vivid colours, shifting scale and perspectives, to create visionary works. He was elected an RA in 2011.
The year 2012 in art involved various significant events.
The Contemporary Art Society (CAS) is an independent charity that champions the collecting of outstanding contemporary art and craft for UK museum collections. Since its founding in 1910 the organisation has donated over 10,000 works to museums across the UK. From the 1930s the Society also donated works to Commonwealth museums, but since 1989 the focus has remained exclusively on UK institutions.
Veronica Maudlyn Ryan is a Montserrat-born British sculptor. She moved to London with her parents when she was an infant and now lives between New York and Bristol. In December 2022, Ryan won the Turner Prize for her 'really poetic' work.
Defne Ayas is a curator, lecturer, and editor in the field of contemporary art and its institutions. Ayas directed, cofounded, curated, and advised several art institutes, initiatives, and exhibition platforms across the globe, including in the United States, Netherlands, China and Hong Kong, South Korea, Russia, Lithuania, and Italy. Exploring art's role within social and political processes, Ayas is best known for conceiving inventive exhibition and biennale formats within diverse geographies, in each instance composing interdisciplinary frameworks that provide historical anchoring and engagement with local conditions. Working between Berlin and New York since 2018, she currently serves as Senior Program Advisor and Curator at Large at Performa. Until June 2021, Ayas was the artistic director of the 2021 Gwangju Biennale, together with Natasha Ginwala.
Simon Fujiwara is a British artist.
Legacy Russell is an American curator, writer, and author of Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto, published by Verso Books in 2020. In 2021, the performance and experimental art institution The Kitchen announced Russell as the organization's next executive director and chief curator. From 2018 to 2021, she was the associate curator of exhibitions at the Studio Museum in Harlem.
Alexandre da Cunha is a Brazilian-British artist, who produces sculpture and wall mounted works, often using found objects. His works have been exhibited around the world, and are located in several major public collections.
