LONDON, ENGLAND.-Chris Ofili’s The Upper Room 1999-2002 has been acquired by Tate and will be a highlight of the new BP British Art Displays at Tate Britain. Acquired with the help of Tate Members, the National Art Collections Fund (an independent charity) and private benefactors, this major work by one of Britain’s leading painters is one of a series of new displays at Tate Britain which opens on 13 September, including new presentations dedicated to William Hogarth, the British Landscape, Romanticism, the Pre-Raphaelites, FN Souza and John Latham among others.

The Upper Room is a landmark work comprising thirteen paintings on canvas, displayed in a specially designed and fabricated room on which Ofili collaborated with architect David Adjaye, and was first shown at the Victoria Miro Gallery in London. The darkened room and spot lighting provides a chapel-like context for the arrangement and display of the paintings; the twelve smaller canvases line the two sides (six on each wall), while the single, larger canvas is placed at the head of the room. This organisation suggests Christ flanked by his twelve disciples. Each of the smaller canvases depicts in profile a monkey of the rhesus macaque species, with each executed in a different colour, named in Spanish on Ofili’s characteristic elephant dung supports.

These face the thirteenth, larger canvas at the end of the room, which is painted in gold and features a much larger monkey, depicted frontally, and can be seen as a Buddha or Christ figure, or an alpha male simian. The Upper Room has been compared with Mark Rothko’s Seagram murals or Barnett Newman’s Stations of the Cross - sequences of paintings which together function as a unified work, with profound spiritual qualities.

Tate Britain will reveal seventeen other new rooms in the BP British Art Displays on 13 September, which reflect the extraordinary breadth of Tate’s collection of British art from 1500 to the present day. Among the highlights is a new presentation of Romanticism in British art in the celebrated Room 9, featuring such icons as John Martin’s trilogy of works depicting hell, purgatory and heaven, and JMW Turner’s pair War and Peace, both 1842. The new presentation also includes three rooms dedicated to Tate’s unrivalled collection of Victorian art, including a display of the work of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, the first room at Tate solely dedicated to this group for several years. It features many of the best-known works in the Tate Collection, including John Everett Millais’ Ophelia 1851-2, as well as paintings by artists who are now less widely known such as Charles Allston Collins.

Among the rooms reflecting Tate’s collection of modern British art is a special display dedicated to the work of John Latham, perhaps one of the most influential figures in post-war British art. The display features his seminal, and controversial, early works in which he uses books as sculptural elements attached to canvases along with more recent works. The Indian-born painter FN Souza is given his first solo display at Tate Britain, which features Tate works such as his dramatic, tortuous Crucifixion 1959 brought together with a number of loans from the Victoria and Albert Museum and elsewhere. A display to mark the eightieth birthday of the abstract painter Sandra Blow is another highlight.

A special display in the Goodison Room marks the gift to Tate of the archive relating to the Outsider Art Collection, which was built by Monika Kinley and the late Victor Musgrave. The display examines what is meant by the term outsider art, tells the extraordinary story of Musgrave and Kinley's search for the artists and includes some original and compelling works lent from the collection itself. This is the first time such material has been displayed at Tate Britain.

Many of the new displays will now form part of the BP British Art Displays for several years to come, joining the permanent spaces given to Blake, Constable and, of course, Turner, in the Clore Gallery. These include the display Hogarth and the Art of Conversation which shows a number of iconic works by the great satirical artist.

Tate Britain’s Director, Stephen Deuchar, said: ‘Chris Ofili’s Upper Room will be one of the many highlights of the new BP British Art Displays. I am delighted that we can show such a major work of recent British art here at Tate Britain, across the gallery from the new displays of Hogarth, the Romantics and the Pre-Raphaelites among many others. These new displays highlight again the extraordinary stories of British art that we tell in our displays at Tate Britain, which are, of course, free to all our visitors. We are extremely grateful to BP for their continuing support of Tate Britain’s displays.’

Jan Debbaut, Director, Tate Collection, said: ‘We are thrilled to have acquired this landmark work by Chris Ofili. One of the most ambitious works produced in Britain in recent years, it is exactly the kind of work that we seek to acquire as part of the Building the Tate Collection initiative, and our visitors will hugely benefit if we can continue to make such major additions to the Collection. We thank Tate Members, the Art Fund and the private benefactors for giving so generously towards its acquisition’.

BP has supported the Collection Displays at Millbank in 1990, first at the Tate Gallery and then from the opening of Tate Britain in 2000 to the present. BP's continued support allows Tate Britain to create a broad and dynamic displays programme which explores in depth British art from 1500 to the present. They are also supporting BP Saturdays, three day-long, free festivals for families and young people. The two remaining events in the series are Loud Tate on Saturday 17 September, for 13 to 19 year olds and Dotty Tate, for families with under 12s, on Saturday 15 October. BP’s other support at Tate includes the BP Conservation Intern Programme, sculpture and installation workshops for schools, BP Artist Talks and the BP British Art Lecture.