Tate Acquires Work by an Overlooked Textile Artist, a Video Inspired by Cancer Treatment, and Other Works From Frieze 2019

Each year, Tate’s director Maria Belshaw and a panel of curators
get up at the crack of dawn, guzzle coffee, and race through Frieze
on empty stomachs before the fair opens to the VIPs in order to
select works for the London museum’s collection. This year, the
group expanded the remit of the Tate Frieze fund even further,
considering artists from Frieze Masters for the first time.

Through the fund, the museum has announced it will acquire works
by London-based artist Marc Camille Chaimowicz, Brazilian artist
Paulo Nazareth, Croatian artist Jagoda Buić, and American artist
Patrick Staff. (The latter two are entirely new to Tate’s
collection.) Buić, whose striking yet understated brown woolen work
is on view at the booth of London’s Richard Saltoun, is the first
artist to be collected under the auspices of Tate Frieze fund at
Frieze Masters.

As the London museum continues to strive to diversify its
collection across generations and Frieze Masters increasingly
offers works from the latter half of the 20th century, the move
felt right. “The fair has changed and evolved,” Belshaw tells
artnet News. “Now, the Spotlight section of Frieze Masters is
showing artists that our panel would consider to be
contemporary.”

Among those  figures is 89-year-old Buić, an important
textile artist who has collaborated with Sheila Hicks and Magdalena
Abakanowicz. Buić’s work was, until now, a significant omission
from Tate’s growing focus on the medium (last year, the museum
mounted an exhibition of work by Anni Albers and next year it will
open an Abakanowicz survey). Saltoun says Buić, who is still
hard at work at her studio in the South of France, “will be very
pleased to hear such brilliant news.”

The budget for the annual prize has grown since it was
established in 2003, and now stands at £150,000 ($184,578). To
date, the museum has purchased over 120 works by more than 80
artists from the fair. This year, the panel of judges included
Eugene Tan, director of the National Gallery of Singapore, and Erin
Christovale, associate curator of the Hammer Museum in Los
Angeles.

Tate’s selections also included Folding Screen
(Five-Part) (1979) by French-born, London-based artist
Marc Camille Chaimowicz from Andrew Kreps Gallery, which the panel
praised for blurring the boundary between the applied and fine
arts.

From Frieze’s youth-focused “Focus” section, the panel
selected a 2007 video work by American artist Patrick Staff
at Commonwealth & Council called Weed Killer,
which takes inspiration from Catherine Lord’s intimate written
account of her cancer treatment, The Summer of Her Baldness: A
Cancer Improvisation. Finally, Tate acquired a series of
drawings by Brazilian artist Paulo Nazareth at South Africa’s
Stevenson Gallery drawn from existing photographs of racially
motivated violence.

The post Tate Acquires Work by an Overlooked Textile Artist,
a Video Inspired by Cancer Treatment, and Other Works From Frieze
2019 appeared first on artnet News.