A globe-spanning surrealism survey, a Cornelia Parker retrospective and a blockbuster Cézanne exhibition are the highlights from Tate’s 2022 season, which is promising to “offer fresh perspectives on key figures, movements and subjects in art history”.
Surrealism Beyond Borders will come to Tate Modern in February and take a internationalist look at the movement, which began in Europe but would make its way around the world from Tokyo and Mexico City to the Egyptian Art et Liberté movement and the Afro-surrealist work of Aime Cesaire in Martinique.
Tate Modern will also hold a major Cézanne exhibition in the autumn. It will feature paintings that have never been displayed in the UK with a promise to “explore the ambitions, innovations and contradictions that defined Cezanne’s life and work”.
Pieces by Polish sculptor Magdalena Abakanowicz, who specialised in textile work and could trace her lineage back to Genghis Khan, will visit Tate Modern from November 2022. The annual Hyundai commission, for which an artist take over Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall and was awarded to Kara Walker in 2019 and Anicka Yi last year, is still to be announced.
Tate Britain will host two major retrospectives: from April, Walter Sickert’s late 19th- and early 20th-century paintings, which captured “a low-life late Victorian world of music halls and shadowy interiors”; and a career-spanning Cornelia Parker survey opening in May will include not only the “cartoon violence” of her installation work but also sculpture, film, photography, drawing and embroidery.
Hew Locke, who featured in Artist & Empire: Facing Britain’s Imperial Past in 2016 alongside Sonia Boyce, will return to Tate Britain to the Duveen Galleries where he will create new work in March 2022.
In November, Tate Britain will host the Lynette Yiadom-Boakye exhibition, which first opened in December 2020 but was cut short due to the Covid-19 pandemic, for a further three months. The work of documentary photographer Bill Brandt, the sculptor Anthony Caro and a survey of the Norwich school of painters will also be on display into 2023.
The institution, which has had a difficult Covid-19 pandemic with staff protests after two rounds of job cuts across its commercial and gallery arms, welcomes Vietnamese artist Thao Nguyen Phan to its St Ives location in February after a well received show at Chisenhale in October 2020.
The Cornish gallery will also offer a “homecoming” to Barbara Hepworth with a major exhibition of her work, which was first seen at the Hepworth Wakefield in 2021 to mark its 10-year anniversary.
Tate Liverpool will again host the Turner prize after it was first held there in 2007, and will also unveil Radical Landscapes in May, which is billed as a group show that will explore how the British countryside has been depicted as a place of “mysticism, experimentation and rebellion” by artists.
