conceptual artists, painters, sculptors and installation artists based in the UK
News
Where are the sensation Paintings NOW? Much of the iconic British work of the 1990's
is now in US collections
Artists
Abigail lane -5 Watt Moon, a photolithograph image derived from her film of the
same name.
Angela Bulloch - a reference to Marcel Du champ's installation Sixteen Miles of String,
shown at the Surrealist exhibition of 1942 in New York.To the Power of 4.
Angus Fairhurst-"Low Expectations, Lower Expectations, Lowest Expectations“; "Fainter
and Fainter“; "The Missing Link“; "Underdone/Overdone“ Things that don´t work properly,
things that never stop
Anya Gallaccio -Blast to Freeze: British Art in the 20th Century, After the Gold
Rush. Fascinated that wine, like art, "is a living thing, and it's unpredictable.
Banksy -"Space Girl and Bird" went for £288,000 controversial Israeli security
wall. Among the images he stenciled on to the Palestine side of the West Bank barrier
were of children digging a hole through the wall, and of a ladder going over the
top.
ChapmanJake and Dinos-Zygotic Acceleration, Biogenetic, De-Sublimated Libidinal
Model (Enlarged x 1000) - (life size fibreglass mannequins of children with genital
organs of both sexes attached to their faces)
Chris Ofili -The Holy Virgin Mary (an African Madonna accessorized by clumps of
elephant dung and cutout genitals from pornographic magazines)
Christine Borland -Bullet Proof Breath (2001), a glass bronchial tree with spider-silk
wrapped branches.
Damien Hirst-Away from the Flock (a single lamb suspended in formaldehyde in a
tank) - "Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living" (a giant
shark suspended in formaldehyde in a tank)
Fiona Banner -The Nam, a 1,000-page book containing a continuous transcription of
six Vietnam war films - Apocalypse Now, Born On The Fourth of July, The Deer Hunter,
Full Metal Jacket, Hamburger Hill and Platoon.
Fiona Rae -Hong Kong Garden is a beautiful show of large canvases covered in symbols,
floral patterns, 70s psychedelic letters, digitized numbers, splattered paint and
loose blurs of colour.
Gary Hume -Begging For It (large, colourful paintings including people and flowers
using household gloss paints)
Gavin Turk -Pop (a waxwork life size model of himself dressed as Sid Vicious)
Richard Patterson - Blue Minotaur (one of a series of close-up paintings of a plastic
toy Minotaur)
Gillian Wearing- Signs that Say What You Want Them To Say and Not Signs that Say
What Someone Else Wants You To Say (Wearing asked strangers to write down anything
and took photographs of them)
Ian Davenport -He covered a whole wall of Tate Britain with hypnotic lines of rainbow
hues for the Days Like These exhibition, The Southwark painting is typical
Jason Martin -''Cha-Cha'' and ''Samba'' have a lot of wave action.
Jenny Saville-Propped (a large-scale self portrait nude oil painting)
Liam Gillick -His design, entitled The Day Before (You Know What They'll Call It?
They'll Call it the Tube) shows the words of the date of the last day before the
Underground opened, written in twelve sets of coloured letters symbolising the twelve
rail lines.
Marc Quinn-Self (a self portrait made of eight pints of the artist's own blood,
frozen)
Marcus Harvey-Myra (an infamous child murderer, Myra Hindley, painted using children's
handprints)
Mark Francis -Thallophyte (1999;2000.) black dots like beads on a cord swirl around
a painterly red ground.
Martin Maloney -We Are Family, Equal Opportunities and Community Association, and
they are loosely based on photographs from newspapers and magazines.
Matt Collishaw -close-up photograph of a bloody head wound called ''Bullet Hole.''
Meredith Vula -women in Turkish baths, and a series showing women standing and moving
beneath the surface of water.
Michael Landy -Nourishment continues with this theme, though in a rather different
way; one which reflects particularly on Break Down.
Rachel Whiteread -Untitled (One Hundred Spaces) (the space beneath one hundred chairs,
cast in many colours of translucent resin) and "Ghost" a cast of the interior of
a whole room.
Ron Mueck-Dead Dad ( a two thirds scale but beautifully accurate model of his naked
dead father)
Sam Taylor-Wood- Five Revolutionary Seconds (peopled interiors are photographed
in five seconds by a special rotating camera that registers a 360-degree view in
one continuous take)
Sarah Lucas -Sod You Gits and Au Naturel (two oranges and a cucumber propped on
a stained mattress)
Simon Callery -Spy, an installation exhibited at the British Council
Tacita Dean -In works such as Bubble House (1999) and Sound Mirrors (1999), we are
shown buildings and places that are charged with a meaning that we cannot fully comprehend,
often depicting a failed or abandoned vision.
Tracey Emin -Everyone I Have Ever Slept With, 1963-95 (a small tent with the names
of Emin's bedmates stitched onto it, which was destroyed in a fire that
engulfed the Momart Warehouse in which it was stored)
Young British Artists or YBAs (also Brit artists and Britart) is the name given to
a group of conceptual artists, painters, sculptors and installation artists based
in the UK. The term Young British Artists is derived from shows of that name staged
at the Saatchi Gallery from 1992 onwards, which brought the artists to fame. It has
become an historic term, as most of the YBAs are now in their forties. They are noted
for "shock tactics", use of throwaway materials and wild-living, and are (or were)
associated with the Hoxton area of East London. They achieved considerable media
coverage and dominated British art during the 1990's
The legendary 1988 Damien Hirst curated exhibition that gave birth to Young British
Art, and Tate Britain's recent "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida," a show that signalled both the
phenomenon's institutional apotheosis and, for many, its creative swan song.
A three-way collaboration between Hirst, Sarah Lucas, and Angus Fairhurst,
Full of gaily coloured fish, spooky animatronics, crucifixions, various sexual organs
and body parts, large animals, and larger numbers of squashed or imprisoned insects.
In March 1992, Hirst showed his infamous tiger-shark-in-a-tank, The Physical Impossibility
of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, 1991, at the Saatchi Gallery, and this piece,
accompanied by intensive media coverage, projected him for the first time beyond
an art audience onto a public stage. The Turner Prize, whose purse had doubled under
new sponsorship by the British television station Channel Four, shifted its generational
focus. Rachel Whiteread in 1993, Damien Hirst in 1995.
Channel Four's affiliation with the prize was a crucial factor in the dissemination
of this new art to a broader public. The second crucial factor was Charles Saatchi's
sudden enthusiasm for collecting emerging British art. He laid out his goods in five
exhibitions between March 1992 and December 1995: "Young British Artists" I, II,
III, IV, and V. Saatchi's title, remembers curator Gregor Muir, became abbreviated
in the curatorial discussions leading to "General Release," the British Council's
national survey for the 1995 Venice Biennale--and from then on entered the lexicon
as "YBA." In 1995 and 1996, as British group shows proliferated around the world--in
Minneapolis, Venice, Houston, Copenhagen, Rome, Wolfsburg, Baden Baden, Sydney, Johannesburg,
Melbourne, Paris, and Tokyo--the acronym was so widely applied that at moments it
denoted no more than "young(ish)" and "making art in Britain."
While Hirst learned his artistic presentation skills from Koons and Haim Steinbach
(his aquariums and cabinets are on one level simply enlarged variations of their
vitrines and shelves, respectively), he also recognized in Koons the value of a branded
artistic identity (a notion reinforced by the careers of both Georg Baselitz and
Gilbert & George, which Hirst observed firsthand working at Anthony d'Offay Gallery
while in art school). This is explicit by 1996 when he describes, in Modern Painters,
his spot and spin paintings as "almost like a logo as an idea of myself as an artist."
But where Koons--and, of course, Koons's role model, Warhol--both critiqued and participated
in the mass media's construction of celebrity by using the media simultaneously as
a central subject of his art and as a promotional vehicle, with Hirst, and later
with Tracey Emin, no comparable conceptual interchange between the media and the
art occurs. Instead, Hirst courted the media one-dimensionally to generate a cult
of personality, while encouraging journalists to depict his artistic persona as (schizo-phrenically)
alternative and avant-garde, as well as glamorous and aspirational. Hirst hagiographer
Gordon Burn, for example, could write romantically of the millionaire, restaurant-owning
pop-impresario artist in The Guardian as late as April 2000 that "he has always used
drugs and drink as a way of isolating himself from banal experience and to bring
him to something original or extraordinary in the moment that nobody else can see."
Charles Saatchi's "Sensation" at the Royal Academy whipped up yet another media storm
to lodge the phenomenon seemingly ever more firmly into national public consciousness.
Tracey Emin's coming-of-age as the public's favourite artist--her place in the nation's
affections secured by Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995, 1995, the tent (destroyed
in the Momart fire) appliqued with dedications to her lovers, her brother, a grandmother,
a teddy bear, and her aborted fetus--and new Saatchi finds like Ron Mueck and his
uncanny Dead Dad, 1996-97, created added media value. The debacle over Harvey's vandalized
painting was matched in volume only by mayor Rudolph Giuliani's loudly offended sensibilities
on another side of the Atlantic, as the show arrived in Brooklyn in October 1999.
But by 1998 even the Saatchi machine recognized that the media's fascination could
not be held forever, and there was a short-lived attempt to manufacture a new "movement"
centred on the group of artists that Martin Maloney had gathered in South London
at his apartment-cum-gallery Lost in Space. So-called New Neurotic Realists like
Peter Davies, Dexter Dalwood, and Luke Gottelier substituted YBA's highly produced
spectacle for a homespun aesthetic, offbeat subjects, and a more modest demeanour,
but without, unsurprisingly, garnering much attention from the mainstream press.
The opening of the new Saatchi Gallery at County Hall in 2003 generated flurries
of coverage, particularly when a whiff of competition was scented between Charles
Saatchi and Nicholas Serota, the Tate director. But now that the space--hovering
above the riverside's hot-dog stands and amusement arcades--has evolved into a visitor
attraction more akin to its neighbors the London Aquarium and Dali Universe than
to the cool and cultural Tate Modern, the media is relatively subdued. At the same
time, the British economy was experiencing a booming consumer culture in the wake
of the 1989-91 recession. The press, chasing advertisers, began to fill its pages
with "lifestyle" journalism rather than consumer-unfriendly news--and natural self-publicists
like Hirst and Emin were close at hand. Hirst's multifarious activities--his music
videos, his restaurants, his record covers, his product design--appeared, for a moment,
to signal a radical disruption of art's specialized terrain. But when stores like
Habitat and Selfridges recognized the consumer advantage in affiliating themselves
with the new British art, the symbiosis between commerce and culture deepened until,
as Simon Ford concluded, "the art becomes inseparable from the products it is helping
to sell--the floor coverings and furnishings, the restaurants and clubs." Rather
than reflect on consumer society, as Pop art did, YBA became an aspect of it.
The Young British Artists from an early stage were more socially than aesthetically
connected. Sarah Lucus has had relationships with, in turn, Damien Hirst, Gary Hume
and Angust Fairhuest. Gillian Wearing had relationships with Michael Land. Tracey
Emin had a relationship with Mat Collishaw. Fiona Rae dated Stephen Park for several
years, and then Richard Patterson for a similar duration. Sam Taylor-Wood has dated
to Gary Hume, Jake Chapman and is currently linked to Jay Jopling. Places where it
would be possible to spot YBAs included the Groucho Club, St. John (a restaurant
specialising in offal) and (in the early years) pubs around Hoxton, such as the Bricklayer's
Arms. Hoxton is known as the heartland of conceptual art (i.e. Britart).
Charles Saatchi's collection of young British artists is one of the most celebrated
collections of contemporary art in the world. "But is it art?" was a frequent cry
during the mid-90s, when he exhibited the works of artists such as Damien Hirst,
Marc Quinn, Gavin Turk and Marcus Harvey. Artists such as these soon fulfilled their
promise and consolidated their reputations, vindicating Saatchi's enthusiasm and
their inclusion in this eclectic group.
One thing is certain: the majority of artists in Freeze, along with others using
similar strategies for making and mediating art, have come to dominate the British
art scene. Moreover, many have made a considerable impact on both sides of the Atlantic
and further afield. Whatever happens next, these artists can no more be written out
of the art history books than can the Pre-Raphaelites, the Vorticists, the Camden
Town Group-or, nearer our own day, the British Pop artists or the new sculptors of
the 1960s and the 1970s, many of whom are still prominent. Art arises out of previous
art and recent generations serve as inspiration to new work, which none the less
has very different, more contemporary concerns. But as far as international reputation
is concerned, it appears that the latest new generation of British artists is having
considerably more impact than its predecessors. British art, even since Henry Moore,
has always appeared to itself and to the outside world to be a little behind, lacking
the innovation that is central to modern art. It was for that reason tinged with
a certain indefinable, if attractive, provinciality. This is clearly no longer the
case. Or is it? Perhaps one of the questions this exhibition will answer is precisely
that-whether art in Britain, never quite central to the European cultural experience,
nor quite radical in terms of the great American art experiment that commenced with
Jackson Pollock, can now hold its own as second to none. Can London become the unchallenged
centre for contemporary art? In the past, Paris, New York and even Dosseldorf have
been able to claim this role. If London could now claim such a position, that would
be grounds for celebration.
What is so new about the art in Sensation? Why has this art had such a public resonance,
unparalleled in this country since the arrival of the Pop generation, many of whom
are now distinguished members of the Royal Academy? The answer lies in this generation's
new and radical attitude to realism, or rather to reality and real life itself. They
combine this with a complex knowledge of recent art developments in Britain and abroad,
which they ambitiously wish to challenge and extend. A visitor to this exhibition
with an open mind will perceive an uncommonly clear mirror of contemporary obsessions.
Presented with both seriousness and humour (often black), and in an extraordinary
diversity of materials and approaches, these works serve as memorable metaphors for
many problems of our times, some of which are shocking. But why were Manet's Olympia
and the Dojeuner sur l'herbe such an outrage to contemporaries? Because by taking
themes and compositions that had acquired the respectability of tradition-in his
case from the Renaissance-Manet drew attention to contemporary problems. He did so
with refinement, but also with naked sensation every bit as attention-grabbing as
that of his contemporary novelists or political commentators.
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British Artists or Brit artists and Britart a group of conceptual artists, painters,
sculptors and installation artists derived from the Sensation Saatchi Gallery Exhibition.
