CategoriesStyles and Movements
Contemporary British Art
Art made in Britain from the 1980s to today, from new sculpture and the Young British Artists to film, photography and painting.
No works indexed yet · 10 related artists
No open-access works for Contemporary British Art are in the index yet. They will appear here as more collections are indexed.
About
British art gained new confidence in the 1980s through sculpture. Tony Cragg arranged coloured plastic fragments into figures and maps, Richard Deacon bent laminated wood into open loops, and Anish Kapoor coated forms in pure powdered pigment. In the same decade Black British artists such as Lubaina Himid, Keith Piper and Eddie Chambers organised exhibitions that put their own experience first, and Chris Killip photographed struggling industrial communities in the North East.
From 1988 a group of London students around Damien Hirst staged their own shows. These Young British Artists used shock, humour and everyday materials: Hirst's shark in formaldehyde (1991), Tracey Emin's unmade My Bed (1998), Sarah Lucas's crude sculptural puns. Rachel Whiteread cast the interior of a whole East London terraced house in concrete for House (1993). The field has since widened to Steve McQueen's films, Grayson Perry's ceramics and Chris Ofili's paintings.