Tate Modern : Structure and Order

April 25, 2015

Having walked the outside of the Tate 2 extension I eagerly made my way to the front door. It was 9.45am on a Friday morning, and in my enthusiasm to get there early Id failed to check what time it opened! 10.00am. T minus 15! A small crowd of sultry French teenagers arrived on a school trip, and others joined them from around the world.

Nonetheless, I was the first person at the door, and as they opened I made my way through and into the turbine hall. A huge sculpture of plywood 'Cams' draped in bright fabric filled one half of this enormous space with an injection of colour and fun. A real contrast between the order and repetition of a giant wing like framework and the unruly draped fabric. I felt inducted into the world of modern art and hungry for more.

Realising the teenagers had all come to see one of the paid galleries on the lower levels, and others were just drifting in, I made a b-line for the fourth floor permanent Structure and Order Gallery. For 45 sublime minutes I had the whole floor to myself! Eagerly I marched around and soaked up as much as I could, finding so much inspiration in the beauty of refined simple forms, the complexity of rotated, repeated elements, and in textures and materials used and manipulated to stunning ends.

One gallery really struck me - a number of pieces from the Constructivist movement by a variety of artists concerned with art as a social practice - through abstraction and how pieces could be constructed from a variety of everyday materials. One piece that really caught my attention was that of the seminal British artist Victor Pasmore. His 'Linear Motif in Black and White' from 1960-1 was so beautifully simple, yet complex in its form and composition. Strangely suggestive of an architectural plan or motif, I wondered how it could be translated into a more 3 dimensional architectural form.