FROM world-renowned masterpieces to cutting- edge new commissions, visual arts in the city will cater for all tastes from the classical to the modern throughout 2008.

Spearheading the arts in Capital of Culture year will be the stunning collections secured by the Tate gallery, which coincidentally celebrates its 20th birthday at the Albert Dock next year.

Its 2008 programme will begin by continuing to ride the crest of the wave of the Turner Prize, which is being held outside London for the first time in its history.

The winner will be announced in a ceremony at the Liverpool Tate on December 3.

The exhibition featuring the work of the four finalists opens on October 19, and will continue until January 13, 2008.

The Tate will also continue running its latest exhibition, The Twentieth Century: How It Looked And How It Felt, which boasts such masterpieces as Rodin’s The Kiss and works from artists including Picasso, Degas and Warhol, until spring, 2009.

At the end of May, the Tate will unveil one of Liverpool’s biggest 2008 art coups, Gustav Klimt: Painting, Design and Modern Life Vienna 1900, the first comprehensive exhibition of the artist’s work ever staged in the UK.

Its other major exhibition of the year will be a career-spanning perspective of the French artist Niki de Saint Phalle, best known for her Fontaine Stravinsky works outside the Pompidou Centre in Paris.

The Walker will present such exhibitions as Art in the Age of Steam, capturing the fear and excitement of early train travel through featured artists including Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro and Edward Hopper; and from September, will be the home of the John Moores Contemporary Painting Prize, which will be marking its 50th anniversary.

Past winners include David Hockney, Peter Doig and Richard Hamilton, while past jurors have included Germaine Greer, Tracey Emin, Peter Blake and Jarvis Cocker.

This year’s competition promises to provoke debate and comment, with the winner taking a prize of £25,000. Visitors will also be able to vote for their favourite painting in the exhibition with a Visitors’ Choice prize of £2,008 awarded to the winning artist.

Early 2008 will also see the re-opening of the all-new Bluecoat, which will boast a new wing hosting more galleries and performance space after three years of closure.

The Bluecoat, which has dropped its formal title of Bluecoat Chambers, will re-open with an exhibition entitled Now/Then, comprising newly-commissioned work by artists who are either associated with Bluecoat itself or are up and coming talents of the international contemporary arts scene.

The FACT Centre devotes its 2008 programme to one concept: Human Futures. Internationally-renowned artists including Orlan, Al and Al, Zbigniew Oksiuta and Pipilotti Rist, will exhibit new commissions and existing work alongside events, workshops, discussions and debates.

SK-Interfaces kicks the year off, an exhibition examining the use of skin as a technological interface.Š

FACT says the programme is “designed to challenge our idea of the world around us and encourage us to develop a vision of the world we want to live in, providing an opportunity to assess the fundamental changes coming our way in how we think about our bodies and our environment in what is an increasingly digitally networked society.”

But art will not be confined to galleries alone. It will spread across the city as the year progresses, most noticeably with the fifth Liverpool Biennial, which promises to be “bigger and bolder than ever before”.

The Biennial will take place from September 20 to November 30, with the programme of international artists yet to be announced but sure to be as thought-provoking and controversial as previous years. Richard Wilson’s striking installation, Turning the Place Over, will keep its place at the former Yates’s Wine Lodge, by Moorfields station, throughout 2008, while Go Superlambanana will see more than one hundred 180cm-high replicas of the famous Liverpool landmark decorated by local artists and dotted around the city throughout June and August.

There will be a year-long programme of public art in the city centre and surrounding neighbourhoods, including winter lights, pavilions, iconic public art, and “visible viruses” – art transported via the city’s transport systems, to parks, and urban spaces.

Down at the docks, with exact location yet to be confirmed, Wet and Sea will create a giant wind and water-powered environmental sculpture; and the Liverpool Botanical Collection will have its own artist in residence, Jyll Bradley, for the year to create a body of work entitled Fragrant.

New paintings from local artists the Singh Twins have also been commissioned.