Page 1063 - Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Coverage Book 2023-24

Yoko Ono in her Half-a-Room, 1967. Photograph: © Yoko Ono
London’s Tate Modern is breaking right out this year with an unexpected run of true
originals – all rarely seen, and profoundly influential. Yoko Ono is first (15 Febuary to 1
September), with a retrospective stretching back to her time as a pioneering conceptual
artist in 1960s London. Almost seven decades of art and activism will include her
famous Cut Piece, in which visitors were invited to cut off fragments of her clothing,
with shocking consequences, and her banned Film No 4, where bare bottoms were
strung together like signatures in a petition for world peace. Music, drawings, films and
photographs will culminate in the interactive Wish Tree. About 40 years overdue, but
better late than never.

Expressionists: Kandinsky, Münter and the Blue Rider (25 April to 20 October) pays
tribute to this pioneering painter couple. The German Gabriele Münter – mirthful,
spontaneous, lush and dynamic in her expressive stroke and colour – falls in love with
the Russian Wassily Kandinsky. Their relationship does not last, but together they form
the Blue Rider group, committed to the expression of soul and spirit in art. With 130
works, as well as sound and performance, this will be the biggest anthology of this era
in more than 80 years.

And for art as spectacular experience, look no further than the solid-light art of the
English-born, US-based Anthony McCall (27 June to 27 April 2025). Spots and beams
projected across pitch-black galleries, these points of light grow into engulfing mist, or
vast hollow cones, through which your fellow visitors will seem to disappear. Cinema
reduced to its basic elements – light passing through time – McCall’s work is
enthralling and endlessly mysterious. LC