The first major show dedicated to queer British art will open next year at Tate Britain to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the Sexual Offences Act of 1967, which decriminalised male homosexuality in England and Wales. Queer British Art (5 April-1 October 2017) will explore “how seismic shifts in gender and sexuality found expression in the arts” according to a statement released yesterday, 19 April, announcing the Tate’s exhibitions programme for 2017.
The show will include works by major 19th- and 20th-century artists such as John Singer Sargent, Duncan Grant, Dora Carrington, Francis Bacon and David Hockney. A century of works, ephemera and personal photographs will be covered in the show, which goes back to another milestone date: 1861, when the death penalty for buggery was abolished.
The show will overlap with “the world’s most extensive retrospective” of David Hockney’s work (9 February-29 May 2017). The exhibition should pull in the crowds at Tate Britain, which has seen a small but steady decline in visitor numbers over the past three years. Hockney’s biggest show to date in the capital, A Bigger Picture, which ran at the Royal Academy of Arts in 2012, was the UK’s most popular exhibition that year and one of the most popular in the world.
Also programmed for next year at Tate Britain, will be the largest-ever exhibition of works by Rachel Whiteread. Spanning 30 years, the retrospective will include never-exhibited works as well as documentation of one of her most famous sculptures, House (1993-4), which was demolished a few months after she won the 1993 Turner Prize for it.
Tate Modern will see two major surveys of Modern masters such as Giacometti (9 May-10 September 2017) in the Spring—hoping to mimic the critical success of his recent portrait show at London’s National Portrait Gallery—followed by Modigliani (22 November 2017-2 April 2018) in the autumn, which will be the most comprehensive survey “ever seen in the UK”, according to the museum’s press statement.
