Light: Works from Tate’s Collection

See art in a new light.

Curated by Tate in the UK and drawn from their prestigious collection, Light: Works from Tate’s Collection celebrates groundbreaking moments from over 200 years of art history, and the artists who harnessed this elemental force through painting, photography, sculpture, drawing, installation and the moving image.

Connected by their fascination with light as both material and subject, more than 70 works feature in this exclusive blockbuster exhibition, including must-see historical paintings by iconic artists like the great Romantic painter J. M. W. Turner, John Constable, Wassily Kandinsky and Josef Albers, as well as the atmospheric beauty and transient light effects captured by Impressionist painters Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro and Alfred Sisley.

These extraordinary paintings are juxtaposed against equally groundbreaking works from modern and contemporary artists: Olafur Eliasson’s crystalline sculpture Stardust Particle (2014), Yayoi Kusama’s kaleidoscopic The Passing Winter (2005), James Turrell’s immersive Raemar, Blue (1969), Tacita Dean’s 16mm film Disappearance at Sea (1996) and Liliane Lijn's moving sculpture Liquid Reflections (1968). Viewed collectively, these radiant works draw fascinating links across time, medium and style, projecting light onto the viewer’s body and absorbing them into visions of infinite lustre and luminosity.

Presented alongside our award-winning centrepiece exhibition The Story of the Moving Image, which explores the essential contribution of light to the moving image, this Melbourne Winter Masterpieces® exhibition, organised in cooperation with Tate, illuminates centuries of artistic practice and uniquely places film in a broader art historical context.

*Note: Lis Rhodes installation, Light Music in Gallery 3 will close on Sunday 23 October 2022. The remainder of exhibition LIGHT: Works from the Tate’s Collection in Gallery 4 will close on Sunday 13 November 2022.