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£150,000 fund enables gallery director Nicholas Serota to acquire three contemporary works at open-air art market
The Tate has gone shopping at the Frieze art fair and acquired three contemporary works, including an example of a "tumour" sculpture by the celebrated Polish artist Alina Szapocznikow.
Each year the Tate's director, Nicholas Serota – along with colleagues from the museums and guest curators – selects works on show at the fair, a vast contemporary art market in Regent's Park, London, featuring work from more than 150 galleries.
This year they had a £150,000 fund, part of an annual bequest linked to Frieze and supplied by Outset, a philanthropic group.
Szapocznikow's work from 1969, four years before her death from cancer, is a small sculpture incorporating a crushed-up photo of the artist, one of a series she produced about her illness.
The other works bought with the fund are a video installation by Melanie Smith, a UK artist based in Mexico, showing the surrealist garden created in Xilitla by the British poet Edward James, and drawings by Helena Almeida, a leading Portuguese artist best known for her dramatic photographic self-portraits daubed with blue paint.
The Frieze money provided "an essential annual injection of new acquisition funds", Serota said.
"This generosity enables Tate to buy significant works of art for the nation and is increasingly important at a time when funding for acquisitions is so limited."
