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7/9/2010

Eadweard Muybridge and Rachel Whiteread

Tate Britain, London

Eadweard Muybridge

The pioneering Anglo-American photographer Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904) will be the subject of a major retrospective at Tate Britain in autumn 2010. Bringing together over 150 works, this exhibition will demonstrate how Muybridge broke new ground in the emerging art form of photography. From his iconic images of motion to depictions of the sublime landscapes of America, the exhibition will present the full range of Muybridge’s work, exploring how he created and honed remarkable images that continue to resonate powerfully.

Born in Kingston upon Thames in April 1830, Muybridge studied photography before building his career in America. Perhaps best known for his extensive photographic portrayal of animal and human subjects in motion, he was also a highly successful landscape and survey photographer, documentary artist, war correspondent and inventor. Muybridge’s revolutionary techniques produced timeless images that have profoundly influenced generations of photographers, filmmakers and artists, including Francis Bacon, Marcel Duchamp, Jasper Johns, Cy Twombly, and Douglas Gordon.

This broadly chronological exhibition will focus on the period of rapid technological and cultural change from the late 1860s to 1904. It will include the celebrated early experimental series of motion-capture photographs such as The Attitudes of Animals in Motion 1881, and the later sequence Animal Locomotion 1887. It will also consider how Muybridge constructed, manipulated and presented these photographs and will feature his original zoopraxiscope, which projected his images of suspended motion to create the illusion of movement.

Muybridge’s carefully managed studio photographs contrast with his panoramic landscapes of America, in which he balanced professionalism with a truly artistic sensibility. He was fascinated by change and progress and his photographs recorded both the natural beauty of this vast continent, and the rapid colonial modernisation of its towns and cities. The exhibition will include many of his series of images of the Yosemite Valley, along with views of Alaska, Guatemala, urban panoramas of San Francisco, and his 1869 survey of the construction of the Eastward bound Railroad through California, Nevada and Utah. These photographs form a unique social document of this fascinating period of history, as well as representing a profound achievement of technological innovation and artistic originality.

Muybridge travelled between Britain, America and Europe throughout his career, studying photography, and later lecturing around the world. In 1874 while living in San Francisco he shot his wife’s lover and had her son placed in an orphanage, but was subsequently acquitted of the crime as a ‘justifiable homicide’, a story retold in Philip Glass’s opera The Photographer. He returned to England in 1894, and died at home in Kingston in 1904.

The exhibition was conceived by Philip Brookman, Chief Curator, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington and curated at Tate Britain by Ian Warrell, Curator of 18th and 19th century British Art, and Carolyn Kerr, Head of Programme Management. The exhibition is organised by the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. A fully illustrated catalogue, published by Tate Publishing, will be available.

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Rachel Whiteread
Drawings

Rachel Whiteread is renowned for her evocative large-scale sculptures, but drawing has always remained one of her core activities. This exhibition offers a rare opportunity to explore her works on paper, most of which have never been shown before in a public gallery.

These collages and drawings provide a fascinating and intimate insight into the creative process behind Whiteread's work. While her sculptures are often large-scale and involve a team of fabricators, these paper works provide a more personal, mobile counterpoint. Nevertheless, they also share many of the themes familiar from her public commissions: texture and surface; void and presence; and the subtle observation of human traces in everyday life.
Organised by the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles

Image: Eadweard Muybridge, Horses. Running. Phryne L. Plate 40, 1879, from The Attitudes of Animals in Motion,, 1881
Image courtesy of the Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Mary and Dan Solomon

For further press information please contact Selina Jones/Alex O’Neill, Tate Press Office
Call 020 7887 4906/4942 E-mail pressoffice@tate.org.uk

Tate Britain
Millbank, London
Opening hours
Tate Britain is open daily, 10.00-17.50
Exhibitions 10.00-17.40 (last admission 17.00)
Admission £10 ( £8.50 concessions)

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