Two ground-breaking craft breweries celebrate the arrival of the af Klint & Mondrian exhibition.
The Tate Eats Tap Takeover series returns this Spring, this time with two new brews inspired by the Hilma af Klint & Piet Mondrian ‘Forms of Life’ exhibition (20 April – 3 September 2023).
As part of their ongoing beer collaboration series Tate Eats is delighted to be working with two ground-breaking craft breweries to celebrate the arrival of af Klint and Mondrian, “Forms of Life” at Tate Modern this April. The beer launches will be celebrated at Tate Eats Tap Takeover on Friday 28th April 2023, as part of Tate Lates.
Andrew Downs, Director of Hops and Ops at Tate Eats comments: “We’ve produced great beer in collaborative brewing projects for nearly 20 years. Tate Eats delivers an excellent experience for visitors. The Takeovers work with our mission to champion British craft beer while amplifying that Tate Eats has exciting, innovative beverages at its core. We’ve long been inspired by the fantastic beer Deya and Verdant create.”
Upcoming Tap Takeover:
‘Verdant Brewing’ & ‘Deya Brewing’
6.30pm on Friday 28th April 2023 at Tate Modern
TATE X VERDANT BREWING ‘THE FIRST NOTE’ IPA
Piet Mondrian is represented in a beer brewed in collaboration with Verdant, a Cornish brewery.
‘The First Note’ is a 5.2% IPA, a hop-forward, endlessly juicy brew, a style for which Verdant is now world famous.
For this project, the brewery has enlisted the talents of Justin Robertson, a Cornish-born London-based artist. He has explored themes from “Forms of Life” to create a Mondrian-inspired artwork that’s name has inspired the brew.
Justin Robertson explains: “Both Piet Mondrian and Hilma Af Klint are huge influences on my work not only in their use of pattern and colour that is both simultaneously harmonious and revolutionary, but also, in their theoretical exploration of the invisible. Their work is like a fantastical map of an alien landscape in a territory that borders our own but is somehow just out of reach”.
TATE X DEYA BREWING ‘SÉANCE’ PALE ALE
Deya Brewing is the collaborator chosen to represent Hilma af Klint. In conjunction with Andrew Downs from Tate Eats, the team has created “Séance” Pale Ale (4.5%).
Séance is a delicious session-able brew that uses orange zest for delightful citrus freshness. Deya’s Thom Hobson created a special edition label, drawing inspiration from Klint’s spirituality.
As Thom explains, “For this artwork, I wanted to embody Hilma’s approach to spirituality. I’ve rendered our crocodile in a way where it feels like it has been summoned by each bodily component bingo prize of a distant outer worldly shape. It feels like a memory, whether familiar is suddenly unfamiliar.”
Both beers will be available in the restaurant and bar spaces within each Tate gallery and via the Tate Shop, including online and partnering webstores for the duration of the exhibition.
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Stay up to date with all upcoming Tate Eats activities by following the @tateeats Instagram. For all Tate Eats press enquiries please contact:
sarah@streetand.co / 07973316818 tamara@streetand.co / 07944032442
TATE EATS
Tate Eats delivers everything from large scale bespoke events to intimate dinners, craft beer collaborations, stunning cocktails, al fresco wood fired pizzas, a vibrant ethical coffee-roasting business, through to family cafes and food for Tate’s staff. All profits are returned
to Tate, supporting the galleries’ mission.
TAP TAKEOVERS
The goal of Tate Eats’ Tap Takeovers is to recognise and celebrate the finesse and flair of local British brewers and foster the growing intersection of craft beer and art. Many of the breweries taking part have also developed bespoke beers to coincide collections, a specific work of art, or a featured exhibition.
DEYA BREWING
Founded in 2015, Deya has been developing innovative and delicious beers from their base in Cheltenham. Inspired by American beer and beer culture, Deya Brewing Company specialises in soft, hoppy beers and juicy IPAs. Deya’s pioneering US Taproom model of promoting on-site sales and consumption while securing relationships with the best speciality beer wholesalers, sees the brewery go from strength to strength.
VERDANT BREWING
Based in Falmouth, Cornwall, Verdant Brewing Company creates hoppy, juicy, hazy, unfiltered, vegan-friendly beers. Verdant was founded in 2014 by homebrewers who teamed up to craft US-inspired beers that weren’t available locally. The team’s focus was hop-forward beers inspired by the New England craft beer scene. The Verdant ethos revolves around brewing flavour-packed beers people love to drink, and ensuring that beer lovers have access to delicious, quality-driven brews.
ABOUT HILMA AF KLINT
Hilma af Klint was born in Solna, Sweden in 1862. After studying classical portraiture at the Technical School in Konstfack, she went on to become one of the first women to study at the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts (1882–7). In 1896 af Klint joined The Five (de Fem), a group of women artists interested in spiritualism, the natural world, and new developments in science. In 1904, during one of their regular séances, she was commissioned by a spirit to create a body of work ‘on an astral plane’ in order to ‘proclaim a new philosophy of life’. The result was The Paintings for the Temple, a body of work comprising six series. On completing the series in 1915, af Klint returned to working on a smaller scale and began to favour watercolours over oils. Af Klint died in 1944, and although her naturalist paintings had been included in the Baltic Exhibition in Malmö in 1914, her abstract works were not displayed until after her death, when in 1986 a painting was included in The Spiritual in Art, Abstract Painting 1890-1985 at Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Her work was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Modern Museum in Stockholm in 2013, and a retrospective on af Klint at the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum in 2018 was the most-visited exhibition in the museum’s 60-year history.
ABOUT PIET MONDRIAN
Piet Mondrian was born in Amersfoort, The Netherlands, in 1872. At the age of 20, he moved to Amsterdam where he studied at the Royal Academy of Visual Arts (1892-5). Initially painting traditional Dutch landscapes, he soon began making Luminist works, some of which were exhibited at the Stedelijk Museum in 1909, firmly establishing him as part of the Dutch avant-garde. Mondrian became a member of the Theosophical society in 1909, and the spiritual influence of the movement directly influenced his representational style. Mondrian’s experiments in Cubism while living in Paris between 1912-4 led him on the path to abstraction. Rather than alluding to three-dimensional illusionistic depth like the Cubists, he wished to accentuate the flat surface of the painting. Back in Holland in 1917, Mondrian co-founded De Stijl, a movement which embraced basic visual elements such as geometric forms and primary colours. Returning to Paris after the first world war, he began making the abstract compositions of rectangles, black lines, white and primary colours for which he became best known. After a few years in London, Mondrian emigrated to New York in 1940, where he began experimenting with coloured lines. Mondrian died on 1 February 1944 in New York.
For all Tate Eats press enquiries please contact: sarah@streetand.co / 07973316818 tamara@streetand.co / 07944032442