Tate Museum Turner Exhibition: The Sublime in Painting and Dialogue with Contemporary Art
A Tate Museum Turner retrospective explores his sublime paintings through dialogue with contemporary art.Summary
J.M.W. Turner (1775–1851), whose 250th birth anniversary was marked in 2025, is regarded as one of the greatest painters in British art history. He depicted the mutable aspects of the world—shifting light and atmosphere, raging seas and skies, and the steam and smoke emitted by humans during the Industrial Revolution—sometimes with precision and sometimes abstractly, expanding the possibilities of painting in highly experimental ways. This exhibition is a retrospective at the Tate in London, which holds the world's largest Turner collection, featuring over 80 oil paintings and watercolors arranged thematically and loosely chronologically. Crucially, it also places Turner's works in dialogue with postwar and contemporary art in each chapter, highlighting how his concerns resonate across time with later artists—a curatorial approach the Tate has helped pioneer internationally in the 21st century. The exhibition examines American Abstract Expressionists' notion of the "abstract sublime," includes works by Olafur Eliasson (b. 1967) to address climate change rooted in Turner's Industrial Revolution era, and features films by the radical collective Otolith Group (founded 2002) that critically recall Western colonialism and the slave trade, confronting ongoing global issues of decolonization and the reconsideration of capitalism in art. Dates: October 24, 2026 – February 21, 2027.
(Source：美術展ナビ)