Young British Artists

Also referred to as Brit artists and Britart, it s the name given to a loose group of visual artists who first began to exhibit together in London, in 1988. They were known for their openness to materials and processes, shock tactics and entrepreneurial attitude. Many of the artists graduated from the BA Fine Art course at Goldsmiths in the late 1980's.

Goldsmiths college of Art played an important role in the development of the movement. It had for some years been fostering new forms of creativity through its courses which abolished the traditional separation of media into painting, sculpture, printmaking etc. In the late 1980's British Art entered what was quickly recognised as a new and excitingly distinctive phase, the era of what became known as the YBA's.

Young British Art can be seen to have a convenient starting point in the exhibition Freeze organised in 1988 by Damien Hirst while he was still a student at Goldsmiths College of Art. Freeze included the work of fellow Goldsmiths students, many of whom also became leading artists associated with the YBAs, such as Sarah Lucas, Angus Fairhurst and Michael Landy.

Michael Craig- Martin

Craig- Martin is a contemporary conceptual artist and painter. He is noted for fostering the Young British Artists, many of whom he taught, and for his conceptual artwork, An Oak Tree. He is Emeritus Professor of Fine Art at Goldsmiths.

In 1973, he exhibited the seminal piece An Oak Tree. The work consists of a glass of water standing on a shelf attached to the gallery wall next to which is a text using a semiotic argument to explain why it is in fact an oak tree.

                 An Oak Tree 1973

Sarah Lucas

  Self portrait with cigarettes 

Au Naturel 1994 Mattress, water bucket, melons, oranges and cucumber

The Bauhaus

The Bauhaus, a German word meaning ' House of building' was a school founded in 1919 in Weimar, Germany by architect Walter Gropius.

Gropius called for the school to show a new respect for craft and technique in all artistic media and suggested a return to attitudes to art and craft once characteristics of the medieval age, before art and manufacturing had drifted apart.
Gropius envisioned the Bauhaus encompassing the totality of all artistic media, including fine art, industrial design, graphic design, typography, interior design and architecture.


Lyonel Feininger (Illustrator), Walter Gropius (Author) manifesto and programme of the state Bauhaus, 1919.

This is woodcut by Lyonel Feininger. It shows a cathedral with a tower whose tip is surrounded by three stars, standing for the three arts of painting, sculpture and architecture, with the rays from them interlaced symbolically.

Paul Klee

Klee was a German water colourist, painter and etcher of fantastic works, mostly small in scale, and is one of the most inventive artists of the 20th Century.
He taught his theory of design in a component of the preliminary course. He supervised the bookbinding, glass painting and weaving workshops at various times at the Bauhaus. Some of his work includes:


                                  Cat and Bird 1928


                         Senecio 1922


Wassily Kandinsky

Kandinsky was a Russian painter,wood engraver, lithographer, teacher and theorist and also a pioneer of abstract art.
He viewed music as the most transcendent form of non objective art - musicians could evoke images in listeners' minds merely with sounds. He strove to produce similarly object free, spiritually rich paintings that alluded to sounds and emotions through a unity of sensation. Kandinsky sought to convey profound spiritually and the depth of human emotion through a universal visual language of abstract forms and colours that transcended cultural and physical boundaries.
Some of his work:


       Squares with Concentric Circles, 1913


                            Composition VIII, 1923

Conceptual Art

The term came into use in the late 1960's to describe artworks in which the concept (or idea) behind the artwork is more important than traditional aesthetic and material concerns.

Land Art

This is usually documented in artworks using photographs and maps. Land artists would also made land art in the galleries by bringing in material from the landscape and use that to recreate their artwork. 

Some land artists include Robert Smithson, Andrew Goldsworthy and Richard Long. 

Robert Smithson

Smithson was an American artist, famous for his use of photography for his sculptures and land art. He exhibited in many galleries around the world including the Galleria George Lester in Rome, Italy, the John Weber Gallery in New York.
His early exhibited artworks were collage works influenced by "homoerotic drawings and clippings from beefcake magazines", science fiction, and early Pop Art.
In 1967 Smithson began exploring industrial areas around New Jersey and was fascinated by the sight of dump trucks excavating tons of earth and rock that he described in an essay as the equivalents of the monuments of antiquity. This resulted in the series of 'non-sites' in which earth and rocks collected from a specific area are installed in the gallery as sculptures, often combined with mirrors or glass.


                     Spiral Jetty 1970


                  Broken Circle 1971


                 Amarillo Ramp 1973


Andrew Goldsworthy

Goldsworthy is a British sculptor, photographer and environmentalist producing site-specific sculpture and land art situated in natural and urban settings. The materials used in Andy Goldsworthy's art often include brightly coloured flowers, icicles, leaves, mud, pine cones, snow, stone, twigs, and thorns.
Goldsworthy produced a commissioned work for the entry courtyard of San Francisco's De Young Museum called "Drawn Stone", which echoes San Francisco's frequent earthquakes and their effects. His installation included a giant crack in the pavement that broke off into smaller cracks, and broken limestone, which could be used for benches. The smaller cracks were made with a hammer adding unpredictability to the work as he created it.


                                                   Autumn Cherry Leaves


                                               Icicle Star, joined with saliva


                      Goose Feathers


                                                     Rowan Leaves & Hole

Richard Long

 Long is an English sculptor and one of the best known British land artists. Several of his works were based around walks that he has made, and as well as land based natural sculpture, he uses the mediums of photography, text and maps of the landscape he has walked over.
In his work, often cited as a response to the environments he walked in, the landscape would be deliberately changed in some way, as in A Line Made by Walking (1967), and sometimes sculptures were made in the landscape from rocks or similar found materials and then photographed. Other pieces consist of photographs or maps of unaltered landscapes accompanied by texts detailing the location and time of the walk it indicates.

His piece Delabole Slate Circle, acquired from the Tate Modern in 1997, is a central piece in Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery.


                                      Delabole Slate Circle


Small White Pebble Circles 1987


     South Bank Circle 1991


       White Water Falls 2012

Social Realism

Social realism was an international art movement, it refers to the work of painters, printmakers, photographers and film makers who draw attention to the everyday conditions of the working class and the poor. 

While the movement's characteristics vary from nation to nation, it almost always utilises a form of descriptive or critical realism. 

This became an important art movement during the Great Depression in the United States in the 1930's. 

Ben Shahn

Shahn was an Lithuanian born American artist. He was best known for his works of social realism. 

Shahn mixed different genres of art. His body of art is distinctive for its lack of traditional landscapes, still lifes, and portraits Shahn used both expressive and precise visual languages, which he coalesced through the consistency of his authoritative line.

His background in lithography contributed to his detail-oriented look Shahn is also noted for his use of unique symbolism, which is often compared to the imagery in Paul Klee's drawings. While Shahn's "love for exactitude" is apparent in his graphics, so too is his creativity. In fact, many of his paintings are inventive adaptations of his photography. 

         Freedom Of The Press 1939

              McCarthy Peace 1968

              Register To Vote 1946

John Augustus Walker

Walker was a well known Alabama artist of the Depression era. 

His paintings reflect a passion for bright colours, heavy dark outlines and painterly brushwork characterized both his commercial and public works. Walker’s preferred subject matter ranged from Mardi Gras, fantasy and historical themes to landscapes and portraiture. 

Maxine Albro

Albro was an American painter, muralist, lithographer, mosaic artist, and sculptor. She was one of America's leading female artists, and one of the few women commissioned under the New Deal's Federal Art Project. 

Albro's artistic style is described as "clean, bright and clear with the strong rounded forms of this era, often depicting the women of Mexico, in particular those of the Tehuantepec region in Oaxaca. 

Albro was most recognized for her frescoes and her characteristic treatment of Mexican and Spanish subject matter. The influence of Mexican art is visible throughout her paintings, murals and lithographs. 

                     Mexico - 1933

                    California - 1934

Pop Art

Pop Art is an art movement that emerged in the mid - 1950s in Britain and the late 1950s in the United States. Among the early artists that shaped the pop art movement were Edwardo Paolozzi and Richard Hamilton in Britain, and Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns in the United States. 

Pop art presented a challenge to traditions of fine art by including imagery from popular culture such as advertising and news. In pop art, material is sometimes visually removed from its known context, isolated, and/or combined with unrelated material. The concept of "pop art" refers not as much to the art itself as to the attitudes behind the art.

Pop art employs aspects of mass culture, such as advertising, comic books and mundane cultural objects.

Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol was a successful magazine and ad illustrator who then became a leading artist during the pop art movement. He then explored a variety of different art forms including performance art, film making, video illustrations and writing. 

Warhol is well known for many of his paintings, including the most famous Campbell's soup cans. Some of his other famous works included coca cola bottles, vacuum cleaners and hamburgers. He also did many celebrity portraits in vivid and garish colours. Warhol's most famous subjects were Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, Mick Jagger and Mao Zedong. 

               Campbell's Soup Cans

                   Marilyn Monroe

               Coca - Cola Bottles

Roy Lichenstein

Roy Lichenstein is an American pop artist, painter, lithographer and sculptor. His work defined the basic premise of pop art through parody. Favouring the comic strip as his main inspiration, he produced hard edged precise compositions that documented while it parodied often in a tongue in cheek manner. Lichenstein's work was heavily influenced by popular advertising and the comic book style. 

Lichenstein is most known for his most famous art work 'Whaam!', ' Drowning Girl', ' Oh, Jeff ... I love you, too ... but ...', ' Look Mickey' and ' Woman with flowered hat'. 

                         Whaam!

    Oh, Jeff ... I Love you, Too ... But...

                    Drowning Girl

                       Look Mickey

Peter Blake

Blake is an English pop artist, best known for co-creating the sleeve design for The Beatles' album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. 

Blake also made album sleeves for the Band Aid single ' Do They Know It's Christmas?', Paul Weller's ' Stanley Road'( 1995 ), the Ian Dury tribute album ' Brand New Boots And Panties' ( 2001 ), The Who's ' Face Dances' ( 1981 ) and Pentangle's ' Sweet Child'. In 2006, Blake also designed the cover for Oasis's greatest hit album ' Stop The Clocks'. 

Band Aid - Do They Know It's        Christmas?

            The Who - Face Dances

             Oasis - Stop The Clocks

Banksy

Banksy is an English based graffiti artist and film director. His satirical street art and subversive epigrams combine dark humour with graffiti executed in a distinctive stencilling and spray paint technique, with commerical, political and contemporary imagery infused with ironic social commentary and humour. 

Some off his most famous work includes 'Love Rat'(2004), 'Girl With Balloon'(2004), 'Kate Moss'(2005). 

                         Love Rat

                   Girl With Balloon 

                       Kate Moss 

Banksy also created a theme park called Dismaland. 

This was like Disneyland however instead of having the magical feel to the park Dismaland was the complete opposite and had the idea of nightmare instead. 

Postmodernism

Postmodernism is a late 20th Century movement in the arts, architecture, and criticism that was departured from modernism. 

Postmodernism includes skeptical interpretations of culture, literature, art, philosophy, history, economics, architecture, fiction, and literary criticism. 

1. Anti- authoritarianism - opposed to authoritarianism. 

2. Collapses boundaries between high culture and the mass culture. 

Jeff Koons

Jeff Koons is an American artist most known for his reproductions of banal objects such as balloon animals produced in stainless steel with a mirror finish surface. 

Jeff Koons rose to prominence in the mid-1980s as part of a generation of artists who explored the meaning of art in a media-saturated era. He gained recognition in the 1980s and subsequently set up a factory-like studio in a SoHo loft on the corner of Houston Street and Broadway in New York. 

His main influences include Andy Warhol, Salvador Dali. 

Grayson Perry

Grayson Perry is an English artist, known mainly for his ceramic vases and cross dressing. Perry's vases have classical forms and are decorated in bright colours, depicting subjects at odds with their attractive appearance.

Perry's work refers to several ceramic traditions, including Greek pottery and folk art. 

In his work Perry reflects upon his upbringing as a boy, his stepfather's anger and the absence of proper guidance about male conduct.Perry's understanding of the roles in his family is portrayed in Using My Family, from 1998, where a teddy bear provides affection, and the contemporaneous The Guardians, which depicts his mother and stepfather.

Much of Perry's work contains sexually explicit content. Some of his sexual imagery has been described as "obscene sadomasochistic sex scenes".He also has a reputation for depicting child abuse and yet there are no works depicting sexual child abuse although We've Found the Body of your Child, 2000 hints at emotional child abuse and child neglect.  In other work he juxtaposes decorative clichés like flowers with weapons and war. Perry combines various techniques as a "guerrilla tactic", using the approachable medium of pottery to provoke thought.