BP Classified at Tate Britain

A free exhibition featuring some of the stars of the contemporary art scene is being held at Tate Britain this summer. BP Classified at Tate Britain gives you the chance to see large-scale work from artists like Damien Hirst, the Chapman Brothers and Mark Dion, all for free. Each exhibit questions the meaning behind everyday objects and messes these meanings up. A rare chance to see how some of the leading lights in art approach semiotics.

Forms of Meaning
The exhibition is an expression of the ways in which we order and code everyday images and objects that surround us. An immediate example is the 1992 piece, Great Bear, by Simon Patterson. His work, which is featured in the exhibition, is a reconfigured version of the London Underground map, an everyday image that is embedded with meaning, despite its simplicity. Other familiar works include Damien Hirst's Pharmacy, a room-sized installation which looks, to all intents and purposes, like a real pharmacy. There's also Tate Thames by Mark Dion which is a collection of objects found on the banks of the River Thames.

Disorder
This is the first time some of the work has been shown at the Tate, including work made-ready, Les Baux-de-Provence by Simon Starling' and In the Bois, a sculpture by Rebecca Warren. BP Classified at Tate Britain is quite an art-centric exhibition, but this makes it in some ways even more accessible to the general public. Its aim is to explore the way artists use ordering systems in the work. This inevitably switches the focus back to the everyday, and how we all have a desire and need to order, categorise and collect. It also demonstrates how artists often manipulate these orders and categories and this shows the fragility of meaning.

Mixed Messages
Other works to appear at BP Classified at Tate Britain explore the stereotypes and hypocrisy bound up with objects. The Chapman Family Collection 2002 by Jake and Dinos Chapman, which has recently been acquired by the Tate, is a remodelling of African masks, mixed with the more familiar, commercial images of the west, such as the McDonald's symbols. A wide range of different art forms are on view at the exhibition, from sculpture, installation and film, including a portrait of Michael Hamburger by Tactita Dean.

Art in a Box
This exhibition, which is sponsored by BP, also showcases the recent major acquistions of British art by Tate Britain. It includes a recent gift to the gallery by Damien Hirst - The Acquired Inability to Escape, one of the artist's earliest pieces to use the display-case format. It shows an office table and desk trapped inside a glass box. There's also his other 1991 piece - Life Without You - which is an arrangement of shells on a desk. Other artists who are exhibitiing include Peter Peri, Fiona Rae, Jeremy Deller, Gillian Carnegie, Phillip Allen, Martin Creed and Ceal Floyer.

Classified at Tate Britain runs from 10am to 5pm from 22nd June - 23rd August 2009. The exhibition is free.

Damien Hirst at Tate Britain

Royal Academy Summer Exhibition

BP Portrait Award

Futurism Exhibition London

Free Graduate Art Fair

Fourth Plinth at Trafalgar Square

Antony Gormley at Trafalgar Square

Dressed To Kill Exhibition London

Henry VIII Exhibition at British Library

Rankin Live Exhibition

Turner Prize at Tate Britain

Delaroche Exhibition London

Venice Exhibition London

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