Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall will be transformed into an immersive opera house as it hosts an exhibition featuring sets David Hockney designed for productions of works by Mozart, Wagner and Stravinsky dating back to the 1970s.
Timothée Chalamet might consider the art form old-fashioned, but the Tate will use the sets as the centerpiece of Hockney’s 90th birthday celebration in 2027.
Best known for his landscapes and portraits, Hockney worked on various opera sets from his time in London before moving to Los Angeles.
After trying out sets at the Royal Court for a production of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi, Hockney would go on to design others, including for Richard Strauss’s fantasy opera. Die Frau ohne Schatten – The woman without a shadow, who adopted a pop-art aesthetic.
He produced 11 opera sets in total over 17 years, starting in 1975.
When asked why he had decided to start working on set designs, his response was characteristically matter-of-fact. “I wanted to design operas because I want to have something to look at,” he said.
The rest of the Tate’s 2027 program includes a retrospective of Sonia Boyce, who won the Golden Lion for Britain at the Venice Biennale in 2022, and a show by Edvard Munch. Tate Liverpool will reopen with a career-spanning show by Chila Kumari Singh Burman, a contemporary of Boyce who hung neon outside Tate Britain in 2020.
There is also a first-ever Monet exhibition at the Tate Modern, called Painting Time, which focuses on the artist’s “obsession with capturing the moment,” according to its curator, Catherine Wood.
The exhibition traces the period leading up to the artist’s famous water lily cycle, which spanned 30 years from the 1890s (when he suffered from cataracts but still painted in his garden in Normandy) until his death in 1926 at the age of 86.
“What you notice is how embodied and immersed he was in cultivating the garden and then capturing it,” he said. “Even when he is going blind, he still tries to paint.”
Created in collaboration with the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris and using loans from individual and institutional collections, Wood said the show would be a fitting way to revisit Monet, whose painting was paired with a piece by Richard Long when the Tate Modern opened in 2000.
Other highlights of the season at Tate Britain include an exhibition of 120 works in Gainsborough to mark the 300th anniversary of the artist’s birth and the first major presentation of Tudor art for 30 years.
At the Tate Modern there are historical exhibitions by Baya, the Algerian artist who influenced Picasso, the Indian Nalini Malani and the American sculptor Lynda Benglis, who adopted latex and Day-Glo pigment in her work.
The announcement of the next season comes in the same month that Maria Balshaw leaves the Tate after nine years in charge of an institution in transition.
Karin Hindsbo will be in charge while the next director is hired. Balshaw’s permanent successor is expected to be announced this summer 2026, an appointment that must be approved by the Prime Minister.
Hindsbo said: “This is an exhibition program that only the Tate could offer. It spans the centuries, from the 16th century to the present day, and spans the globe, from Europe to Asia, Africa and the Americas.
“Even more importantly, the program reflects a deep appreciation for the artists themselves. All of these exhibitions showcase the different ways artists think and work, and their unique ability to inspire and move us.”
