The new Tate Modern extension will include a dedicated gallery for Artist Rooms, a collection given by the retired London dealer Anthony d’Offay. This large gallery room on the fourth level of the extension will show a changing annual display of works by one of the 40 artists represented in the collection. D’Offay’s foundation is also making a financial contribution towards the £260m Tate Modern extension, which is scheduled to open on 17 June.
The inaugural display in the Artist Rooms gallery will be devoted to Louise Bourgeois, the Franco-American sculptor who died in 2010. It will include some of her final works, done just months before her death aged 98.
The Tate and the National Galleries of Scotland jointly acquired the Artist Rooms collection in 2008 for the much reduced price of £26.5m (it was valued at £125m). The idea is to tour a “room” of works dedicated to an individual artist to galleries around the UK. Selections from the collection have now been shown in 76 galleries across the country and seen by nearly 40 million people.
Nicholas Serota, the director of the Tate, described the Artist Rooms collection as “the most important gift ever of contemporary art to the nation”. Since 2008, the collection has grown from 725 to 1,600 works thanks to further donations from d’Offay and the represented artists.
The collection continues to expand. Serota told The Art Newspaper that the Lichtenstein Foundation is likely to donate 16 large-scale prints by Roy Lichtenstein to add to the existing holdings of his work that came from d’Offay.