Tate Liverpool relaunches in time for Capital of Culture

Tate Liverpool is preparing to relaunch its permanent collection under a new name and brand, with the help of graphics consultancy Glorious Creative and London marketing agencies Fallon and Clear.

The gallery is in the middle of preparations for a major collection rehang, ahead of the city’s 2008 presidency as the European Capital of Culture.

A spokesman for Tate Liverpool says that the new collection will come from the Tate’s storage, as well as from Tate Modern and Tate Britain in London.

It will occupy three of the gallery’s four floors, alongside the Turner Prize exhibition.

Manchester consultancy Glorious Creative was appointed to the project seven weeks ago, without a pitch, to create concepts for the exhibition graphics and to devise a navigational scheme to guide visitors around the figurative and abstract collection.

The consultancy has also produced a commemorative book to mark the occasion.

Fallon has rebranded and named the collection The Twentieth Century: How it Looked and Felt, while Clear is understood to be working on promotional signage and banners around the foyer and outside of the gallery. The over-arching Tate brand by Wolff Olins will not be affected.

Glorious design director on the project Tom Shaughnessy explains that one of the challenges of the project was to simplify and categorise such a large body of work, across a long time period.

‘Trying to deal with 100 years of figurative and abstract work and putting that into a coherent scheme was the biggest challenge. Each figurative and abstract is broken down into various sections,’ he says.

‘We also wanted to show that the two disciplines actually cross over to one another and that they’re not completely separate,’ he adds.

Glorious has used a colour-coded scheme to address these issues and to help visitors to ‘know where they are in terms of time around the exhibition’.

Tate Liverpool is keeping the brand and graphics under wraps until the official launch of the collection on 27 September.

The Twentieth Century: How it Looked and Felt will run until spring 2009.