Take a look inside the new Tate Modern wing that's part of a £260 million redevelopment

Advertisement

New Tate Modern

Business Insider/Will Martin

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.

Advertisement

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.

Advertisement