Tate has announced three new acquisitions made possible through the 2025 Frieze Tate Fund, supported this year by £150,000 in philanthropic contributions. The works — by Lubna Chowdhary, Barbara Walker, and Madge Gill — reflect the museum’s ongoing commitment to expanding its collection with artists whose practices challenge and enrich the narrative of British and international art.
Lubna Chowdhary’s Assembly (2025), acquired from Jhaveri Contemporary at Frieze London, comprises seventy-three ceramic and sapele wood elements arranged in rhythmic formation. Chowdhary, born in Tanzania and based in London, has long explored the intersections of modernity, material culture, and craft. Her installations often merge architectural precision with the tactile intimacy of hand-made process. Assembly continues this dialogue — a sculptural meditation on form and multiplicity, suspended between ornament and structure.
From Victoria Miro, Tate acquired End of the Affair II (2025) by Birmingham-based artist Barbara Walker, known for her powerful drawings that confront histories of race, visibility, and erasure. Executed in Conté, charcoal, and pastel, the work combines scale with intimacy, depicting the human figure as both presence and absence—a continuation of Walker’s ongoing project to reinscribe Black subjects into the visual record of Britain.
A third work, Untitled (Venus Mid Heaven) (1920/30), by self-taught visionary Madge Gill, was acquired as a promised gift from philanthropist Lance Uggla. Shown by The Gallery of Everything at Frieze Masters, the vast ink-on-calico composition exemplifies Gill’s intricate, trance-like drawing practice, which she developed over decades as a form of spiritual and personal expression.
Since Frieze London’s inception in 2003, the Frieze Tate Fund has enabled the acquisition of over 170 works by more than 100 artists, many of which now circulate across Tate’s four galleries and partner institutions nationwide. Recent purchases have already entered public display: at Tate Modern, Rita Keegan’s Homage to Frida Kahlo (1987) is on view ahead of next year’s major Kahlo exhibition, while Adam Farah-Saad’s and Tessa Boffin’s works feature in Tate Britain’s contemporary displays — both acquired via the 2023 fund.
Tate Director Maria Balshaw praised this year’s selections: “We are delighted that the Frieze Tate Fund has continued this year thanks to generous philanthropic support, allowing us to enrich Tate’s collection with these outstanding works. I know they will make fantastic additions to our galleries, and I look forward to sharing them with the public in the years to come.”
The 2025 selection panel was led by Gregor Muir, Director of Collection, alongside Dominique Heyse-Moore, Nicoletta Lambertucci, and Valentine Umansky.
The Frieze Tate Fund remains a vital bridge between the commercial and institutional art worlds — a platform through which new voices and overlooked practices continue to enter Britain’s national collection, ensuring that the story of contemporary art remains as diverse, restless, and unpredictable as the time it seeks to reflect.