Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Tate Modern, the UK's biggest and most prominent modern art gallery, has had a major overhaul, adding an entire new wing to the already enormous gallery, and creating a huge new space for displaying 20th and 21st century art from across the world.
Located on the southbank of the Thames in the heart of central London, Tate Modern first opened in 2000, and has been rapidly expanding its visitor numbers and the size of its collection ever since. The Switch House, as it is known, has been built to cope with increasing demand from visitors.
“I don’t think any of us anticipated the depth of interest in modern and contemporary art. We expected we would begin work around 25 years on from the opening, but by 2005 it was already clear we needed to move more quickly," Tate's director Nicholas Serota told the Guardian earlier this week.
The new wing of the museum focuses heavily on art from areas of the world generally underrepresented in western galleries, like Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America, as well as giving exposure to a higher proportion of female artists.
As a member of the Tate, I got to take a look at the new wing on Wednesday night, before it opened to the public. Here's what I saw.
The new extension, called the Switch House, has cost around £260 million to build and nearly doubles the floor space of the already enormous gallery.
Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
Modelled to look like a pyramid, the new wing is visually stunning and absolutely dwarfs every other building in the vicinity, including the gallery's famous chimney. It was designed by architects Herzog and de Meuron.
Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
While the art is obviously meant to be the focus of the Switch House, when I visited, the main attraction was the phenomenal view from the new roof terrace. Visitors can see pretty much every famous attraction in London from the deck.
Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider
