Tate Modern Bankside, London, SE1 9TG
Opening Hours: Sunday to Thursday: 10am -6pm; Friday and Saturday, 10am – 10pm.
I hope I’m not the only person to have confused Tate Modern and Battersea Power Station. Once, in my neophyte days of art appreciation, I was visiting the Tate Modern alone for the first time and, being sketchy on London geography, panicked a little when I saw from the train window a similar building just before Vauxhall. One frustrating and quite tiring trek along the length of the South Bank later, you can imagine how much I wished I’d paid closer attention to the cover of Pink Floyd’s Animals. ‘Four chimneys bad, one chimney good’ will now forever be my motto.
Having never been much interested in paintings of pretty landscapes and suchlike, it was my final year of university visits to Tate Modern, with its menagerie of pianos on ceilings and towering balloon Pinocchios, that really provided my introduction to the stimulating canon of 20th-century visual art, from which point I have since begun working backwards in time to develop an appetite for art of earlier periods. While it is now the Surrealists in the Poetry and Dream section on Level 3 that are my greatest love, for my friends and I it was originally the Abstract Expressionists on the same floor that made the initial ground-breaking impact – the tangled thickets of Pollock and, in particular, the Rothko Room, which seems to both exemplify and negate the ethos of the Tate Modern with its peaceful intensity of immense blocks of red and black.
When I enter the ground floor of Tate Modern and gaze up at the vastness of those empty factory walls (Turbine Hall installations notwithstanding), I like to envisage every inch of that grey space covered with paintings, sculptures and installations of the most varied, vivid hues. In so doing my biggest frustration with the gallery becomes its greatest strength – the spur to the visual imagination that it provides.
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