In Focus

Photographs that challenge journalistic representations of activism and agency in the Indian women’s movement

Through its combination of movement, light, colour and music, this artwork made a radical contribution to British modernism

Burn Hole is infused with both the painterly style of art informel and the anti-art gestures of the Nul group

Around the Blues was painted when Sam Francis was travelling the world and developing a new approach to abstract space

This small model for an unrealised monument was the first work of post-war American sculpture to enter Tate’s collection.

Blood of a Poet Box 1965–8 was Eleanor Antin’s first conceptual artwork, introducing the themes of identity, originality and genius to her artistic practice.

Cathedral became one of the first works by an African American artist to be shown at the Venice Biennale.

Sue Fuller’s construction testifies to the often overlooked influence of craft traditions on the development of modernist abstraction.

The American abstract expressionist artist Barnett Newman considered his painting Adam 1951, 1952 a major achievement in his efforts to visualise what he called the ‘metaphysical content’ of art.

Liliana Porter’s Wrinkle 1968 recasts printmaking as a conceptual art form rather than a labour-intensive craft.

Pompeii 1959 gained an international reputation in the 1960s, representing Hans Hofmann and his ‘slab’ paintings across the US, Europe and South America.

This In Focus explores Oppenheim’s Salt Flat through the systems aesthetics of critic Jack Burnham.

Franz Kline’s late work Meryon 1960–1 calls into question established ideas about abstract expressionism, including its essential ‘Americanness’.

This In Focus presents Rosenquist’s Silo as a reflection on the image of the female consumer in the 1950s and 1960s

The first in-depth study of this key nude portrait by Barkley L. Hendricks

This In Focus explores Women Singing II – a painting inspired by pop singers that Willem de Kooning saw on television – as the product of a shifting

First displayed in a partially dilapidated artist-run space in New York, Walls Paper’s photo-silkscreens of cracking, crumbling urban walls mirrored the site’s own deterioratio

This In Focus presents the first in-depth study of this key work of conceptual art from the 1970s

Filmed from a helicopter circling the Statue of Liberty in New York, Steve McQueen’s Static fixes its gaze on this most iconic representation of freedom

This In Focus examines how Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel’s Evidence complicates the conventions and assumptions of photographic truth.

Given by the artist to prominent art critic Clement Greenberg, Gift exemplifies Greenberg’s taste for high modernist abstraction.

This In Focus asks whether Dancers on a Plane – a key painting from Johns’s ‘crosshatch’ period – can be seen as a work about the shifts and transitions taking place in the artist’s style and career in the early 1980s.

Fresh research into Knights’s dramatic depiction of the biblical flood charts its relationship to religion, conflict, dance and gender, and suggests new art historical sources for the painting.

Psychoanalytic ideas, ethnographic display and the artist’s free associations between physical remains, personal memories and historical events shape this in-depth new study

New research into Constable’s brooding, dramatic and compositionally complex Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows

This In Focus presents the first sustained analysis of this enigmatic painting – now regarded as a key work in Bell’s oeuvre and in the histories of British and European modernism.

Offering a multi-disciplinary discussion of Gainsborough’s early triple portrait, this project considers the painting as a depiction of polite and refined society

Examining Allan Sekula’s ‘anti-journalistic’ manifesto Waiting for Tear Gas in a new light, this In Focus considers the work as a radical form of portraiture and of street photography, a critique of the journalistic photo-essay and a profound anti-capitalist statement.

Using contemporary reviews of this major work, the artist’s own papers and a visit to the original site, this In Focus asks: is this a religious painting, a religious painting in disguise, or a painting about religious doubt?

Through analysis of source material, the artist’s creative process and new archival resources, this In Focus investigates new interpretations for this pivotal painting’s reception in Paris at a time of artistic and political turbulence.

Tate’s first acquisition of a work by a contemporary American artist after 1945, Orthodox Boys is charged with the anxieties and aspirations of Jews in post-war New York. Its graffitied wall offers a constellation of names from the artist’s own life, examined here in depth for the first time.

Tracing the early evolution of Black Wall, this In Focus reveals Nevelson as a collector and scavenger on the streets of New York, and features a newly digitised interview with the artist by critic David Sylvester.

Offering new information on techniques and materials as well as contemporary accounts of the reception of the work, this In Focus explores this unfolding Norfolk landscape, seeking greater understanding of the artist’s motivations, the painting’s title and its likely date of execution

The most detailed investigation of this photographic series to date, this In Focus explores the ongoing use of the prints in Kiefer’s work and positions Heroic Symbols in the wider cultural and political context of post-war Germany.

An early sketchbook owned by Tate, analysed here for the first time, informs this thorough investigation of Rothenstein’s early development, focusing on a painting long considered the artist’s most important work.

This In Focus situates Smith’s film historically, analyses its intersections with film and visual theory, and explores the changing conditions of its exhibition and reception.

Exploring how On Three Posters advances the intellectual and creative production of the performance upon which it was founded, this In Focus also examines the significance of the work in relation to the image politics of the Lebanese Left.

Drawing on material in the Tate Archive and early twentieth-century sports periodicals, and using previously unexamined material about Gaudier-Brzeska’s interest in wrestling, this project sheds new light on the sculpture and its cast.

This In Focus discusses the creation and reception of these two sculptures in the context of the Victorian enthusiasm for ancient Egypt, providing the first translations of some of the hieroglyphs found on their decorative bases.