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| Gillian Ayres The Colour That Was There 1993 screenprint and acrylic paint on paper Tate Gallery |
"Ayres made this work in her studio on the Devon-Cornwall border in the UK in 1993. It is one of five artist's proofs of an original screenprint that Ayres disliked once made and chose not to publish. However, she decided to work over some of the proofs of the print using acrylic, producing The Colour That Was There and a second, related image. Although first made as a work in its own right, at the invitation of Tate Gallery Publishing, Ayres submitted The Colour That Was There as a design for a scarf that Tate was intending to produce, subsequently offering the original painted print as a gift to the museum. The work's title could be a reference to its initial incarnation as a screenprint, which may have been differently coloured, or perhaps to a colour that was obscured by Ayres's act of painting over the print with acrylic. However, in 2001 Ayres stated of her use of titles in general: 'I like the titles and care about them but they do not describe the paintings'."
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| Georg Baselitz Adieu 1982 oil paint on canvas Tate Gallery |
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| Stephen Buckley Les Flons Flons 1981-82 screenprint Tate Gallery |
"The title of this print is not translatable into English as it means the sound and atmosphere of a fair or carnival. It is 'built up with drawings made actual size on tracing cloth using a water soluble opaque ink. There were seven screens/colours'. The orange mesh to the left was done 'from masking tape on tracing cloth exposed directly onto the screen'. The background was made up from two photographic separations from Buckley's original full-size drawings and the leaf shapes and striped discs were done from two and three photographic separations respectively. The colours were finalised through 'instinct and trial and error plus an idea in my head that I wanted print colours rather than paint colours'."
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| Patrick Caulfield Les Demoiselles d'Avignon vues de derrière 1999 screenprint Tate Gallery |
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| Michael Finn Red Painting ca. 1989 acrylic paint on canvas Tate Gallery |
"Michael Finn (1921-2002) began painting in earnest only in the last twenty years of his life, when he retired from teaching in art schools and moved to Tregeseal in West Cornwall. Finn's belief in the transcendent potential of colour was a reflection of his deeply felt Roman Catholic faith. Finn worked intuitively, allowing chance to inform his painting style. He commented that his aim was 'to say something about the density of experience and the wonder of light'."
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| Derrick Greaves Canal 1997 acrylic paint on canvas Tate Gallery |
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| Peter Halley The Place 1992 acrylic paint on canvas Tate Gallery |
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| John Hoyland Vigil 1980 etching Tate Gallery |
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| Bruce Nauman Untitled 1994 lithograph Tate Gallery |
"This is a large, three-colour lithograph. It depicts the upper bodies of two men, seen in profile, shaking hands. The men are clowns, although this is not obvious from their appearance. They are smiling, open-mouthed, at each other. . . . Behind each clown's head is a diagram of a side view of a male groin with an erect and a flaccid penis. A curved line with arrows pointing up and down indicates movement of the penis from erect to flaccid and vice versa. . . . At the top of the page the handwritten words 'hand pumps up + down / penis pumps up + down' appear back to front in blue. . . . Nauman explained his interest in clowns: 'The basic idea came from the clown videotapes I did. Like the reference to a "mask" the clown is another form of disguise. The traditional role of the clown is to be either funny or threatening – their position or function is ambiguous, and I like that'."
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| Thérèse Oulton Untitled 1987 monotype, oil paint and sand on paper Tate Gallery |
"This is one of a number of monotypes, all of which are untitled, made by Oulton at the Garner Tullis Workshop in Santa Barbara, California, in early February 1987. Oulton brought to the workshop her own Windsor and Newton oil paints, and, as is her standard practice, mixed her palette at the beginning of each day. She applied paint with brushes, wiping parts of the plate with etcher's scrim to create the scrubbed appearance of the upper section of the disc. It was printed onto remarkably thick, hand-made paper, produced especially for the Garner Tullis Workshop. In conversation Oulton described this particularly heavy type of paper, with its marked surface texture, as 'unsympathetic', and added that she was perturbed by the contrast between the textured border area and the flattened paint surface and paper in the image area, the result of both the thickness of the paper and the amount of pressure applied by the printing press. She said, 'Generally, I am not very at home, even with my oil paintings, with confrontational ways of making things'."
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| Thérèse Oulton Untitled 1987 monotype Tate Gallery |
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| Fiona Rae Night Vision 1998 oil paint and acrylic paint on canvas Tate Gallery |
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| Gerhard Richter St John 1988 oil paint on canvas Tate Gallery |
"St John belongs to a series called the 'London Paintings', each named after one of the chapels of Westminster Abbey. The titles are not meant to be descriptive, but refer merely to associations connected with the artist's visit to London. Since 1980 Richter has made his abstract paintings by manipulating spatulas of different lengths, loaded with paint, across areas of the canvas. New layers of colour cover earlier ones. Richter's inability to control the precise distribution of paint allows a degree of chance to determine the paintings' final appearance."
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| Gerhard Richter Abstract Painting (809-3) 1994 oil paint on canvas Tate Gallery |
– quoted texts based on curator's notes at Tate Gallery