The Young British Artists, or YBAsSometimes with lower case, "young British artist(s)" or "yBa".—also referred to as Brit artists and Britart—is a loose group of visual artists who first began to exhibit together in London in 1988. Many of the YBA artists graduated from the BA Fine Art course at Goldsmiths, in the late 1980s, whereas some from the group had trained at Royal College of Art.Blanché, Ulrich (2018). Damien Hirst. Gallery Art in a Material World. Baden-Baden, Tectum Verlag, p. 69.
The scene began around a series of artist-led exhibitions held in warehouses and factories, beginning in 1988 with the Damien Hirst-led Freeze and, in 1990, East Country Yard Show and Modern Medicine.
They are noted for "shock tactics", use of throwaway materials, wild living, and an attitude "both oppositional and entrepreneurial". They achieved considerable media coverage and dominated British art during the 1990s; internationally reviewed shows in the mid-1990s included Brilliant! and Sensation.
Many of the artists were initially supported and their works collected by Charles Saatchi. One notable exception is Angus Fairhurst.Blanché, Ulrich (2018). Damien Hirst. Gallery Art in a Material World. Baden-Baden, Tectum Verlag, p. 73. Leading artists of the group include Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin. Key works include Hirst's The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, a shark preserved in formaldehyde in a vitrine, and Emin's My Bed, a dishevelled double bed surrounded by detritus.
Origin
There is some disagreement as to the first use of the term "young British artists." Tate claims that it was Michael Corris in a footnote in Artforum, May 1992,Corris, Michael. "British? Young? Invisible? w/Attitude?.", Artforum, May 1992, p. 109. Retrieved from , 20 April 2011. Others claim that it was Saatchi who had already entitled his exhibition Young British Artists I in March 1992.Kent, Sarah. Shark infested waters. The Saatchi Collection of British Art in the 90s, London 1994, p. 268. The acronym "YBA" (or "yBa") was not coined until 1994.Blanché, Ulrich (2018). Damien Hirst. Gallery Art in a Material World. Baden-Baden, Tectum Verlag, p. 67. It has become a historic term, as most of the YBAs were born in the mid-1960s.Blanché, Ulrich (2018). Damien Hirst. Gallery Art in a Material World. Baden-Baden, Tectum Verlag, p. 76.
YBA artists
The core of the YBA group graduated from the Goldsmiths BA Fine Art degree course in the classes of 1987–1990. Liam Gillick, Fiona Rae, Steve Park and Sarah Lucas, were graduates in the class of 1987. Ian Davenport, Michael Landy, Gary Hume, Anya Gallaccio, Lala Meredith-Vula, Henry Bond, Angela Bulloch, were graduates in the class of 1988; Damien Hirst, Angus Fairhurst, Mat Collishaw, Simon Patterson, and Abigail Lane, were graduates from the class of 1989; whilst Gillian Wearing, and Sam Taylor-Wood, were graduates from the class of 1990, and Jason Martin was graduated with the class of 1993. During the years 1987–1990, the teaching staff on the Goldsmiths BA Fine Art included Jon Thompson, Richard Wentworth, Michael Craig-Martin, Ian Jeffrey, Helen Chadwick, Mark Wallinger, Judith Cowan and Glen Baxter.
Gavin Turk and Mark Francis are also part of the YBA group of artists. Turk and Francis studied at Chelsea School of Art from 1986 to 1989, and at the Royal College of Art from 1989 to 1991. Turk and Francis exhibited work in the Saatchi Sensation exhibition at the Royal Academy.
Freeze
A group of sixteen Goldsmiths students took part in a group exhibition of art, called Freeze, of which Damien Hirst became the main organiser; he was still in the second year of a BA in Fine Art.
Commercial galleries had shown a lack of interest in the project, and it was held in a cheap non-art space, a London Docklands admin block (usually referred to as a warehouse). The event resonated with the 'Acid house' warehouse rave scene prevalent at the time, but did not achieve any major press exposure. One of its effects was to set an example of artist-as-curator—in the mid-1990s artist-run exhibition spaces and galleries became a feature of the London arts scene.Blanché, Ulrich (2018). Damien Hirst. Gallery Art in a Material World. Baden-Baden, Tectum Verlag, p. 61.
Other shows
There was a less prominent predecessor organized by artist Angus Fairhurst, featuring himself, Damien Hirst, Abigail Lane, and Mat Collishaw in a small show called Progress by Degree at the Bloomsbury Gallery of the University of London (Institute of Education) shortly before Freeze.Blanché, Ulrich (2018). Damien Hirst. Gallery Art in a Material World. Baden-Baden, Tectum Verlag, p. 68.
In liaison with Hirst, Carl Freedman (who had been friends with him in Leeds before Hirst moved to London and was helping to make Hirst's vitrines) and Billee Sellman then curated two influential "warehouse" shows in 1990, Modern Medicine and Gambler, in a Bermondsey former factory they designated Building One. To stage Modern Medicine they raised £1,000 sponsorships from artworld figures including Charles Saatchi. Freedman has spoken openly about the self-fulfilling prophecy these sponsors helped to create, and also commented that not many people attended these early shows, including Freeze.
In 1990, Henry Bond and Sarah Lucas organised the East Country Yard Show in a disused warehouse in London Docklands which was installed over four floors and 16,000m2 of exhibition space. Writing in The Independent, art critic Andrew Graham-Dixon said:"Goldsmiths graduates are unembarrassed about promoting themselves and their work: some of the most striking exhibitions in London over the past few months—"The East Country Yard Show", or "Gambler", both staged in docklands—have been independently organized and funded by Goldsmiths graduates as showcases for their work. This has given them a reputation for pushiness, yet it should also be said that in terms of ambition, attention to display and sheer bravado there has been little to match such shows in the country's established contemporary art institutions. They were far superior, for instance, to any of the contemporary art shows that have been staged by the Liverpool Tate in its own multi-million-pound dockland site."Andrew Graham-Dixon, "The Midas Touch?: Graduates of Goldsmiths School of Art dominate the current British art scene," The Independent, 31 July 1990, p. 13.
Established alternative spaces such as City Racing at the Oval in London and Milch gave many artists their first exposure. There was much embryonic activity in the Hoxton/Shoreditch area of East London focused on Joshua Compston's gallery. In 1991, the Serpentine Gallery presented a survey of this group of artists with the exhibition Broken English. In 1992, Charles Saatchi staged a series of exhibitions of Young British Art, the first show included works by Sarah Lucas, Rachel Whiteread and Damien Hirst.
A second wave of Young British Artists appeared in 1992–1993 through exhibitions such as New Contemporaries, New British Summertime and Minky Manky (curated by Carl Freedman). This included Douglas Gordon, Christine Borland, Fiona Banner, Tracey Emin, Tacita Dean, Georgina Starr and Jane and Louise Wilson. One exhibition which included several of the YBA artists was the 1995 quin-annual British Art Show.
Revitalization of British art scene
The Young British Artists revitalised (and in some cases spawned) a whole new generation of contemporary commercial galleries such as Karsten Schubert, Sadie Coles, Victoria Miro, Maureen Paley's Interim Art, and Jay Jopling's White Cube.Blanché, Ulrich (2018). Damien Hirst. Gallery Art in a Material World. Baden-Baden, Tectum Verlag, p. 73-74. The spread of interest improved the market for contemporary British art magazines through increased advertising and circulation. Frieze launched in 1991 embraced the YBAs from the start while established publications such as Art Monthly, Art Review, Modern Painters and Contemporary Art were all re-launched with more focus on emerging British artists.
Charles Saatchi's involvement
One of the visitors to Freeze was Charles Saatchi, a major contemporary art collector and co-founder of Saatchi and Saatchi, the London advertising agency. Saatchi then visited Gambler in a green Rolls-Royce and, according to Freedman, stood open-mouthed with astonishment in front of (and then bought) Hirst's first major "animal" installation, A Thousand Years, consisting of a large glass case containing maggots and flies feeding off a rotting cow's head. (The installation was later a notable feature of the Sensation exhibition.)
Saatchi became not only Hirst's main collector, but also the main sponsor for other YBAs–a fact openly acknowledged by Gavin Turk. The contemporary art market in London had dramatically collapsed in mid-1990 due to a major economic recession, and many commercial contemporary galleries had gone out of business. Saatchi had until this time collected mostly American and German contemporary art, some by young artists, but most by already established ones.
His collection was publicly exhibited in a series of shows in a large converted paint factory building in St John's Wood, north London. Saatchi's Gallery inspired young artists to produce large concept artworks that would not fit in the usually small galleries in London at that time.Blanché, Ulrich (2018). Damien Hirst. Gallery Art in a Material World. Baden-Baden, Tectum Verlag, p. 62-63. Previous Saatchi Gallery shows had included such major figures as Warhol, Guston, Alex Katz, Serra, Kiefer, Polke, Richter and many more. In the early-1990s, Saatchi altered his focus to emerging British art.
Saatchi put on a series of shows called Young British Artists starting in 1992, when a noted exhibit was Damien Hirst's "shark" (The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living), which became the iconic work of British art in the 1990s,Brooks, Richard. , The Sunday Times, 16 January 2005. Retrieved 14 October 2008. and the symbol of Britart worldwide.Davies, Serena. "Why painting is back in the frame", The Daily Telegraph, 8 January 2005. Retrieved 15 October 2008. In addition to (and as a direct result of) Saatchi's patronage, the Young British Artists benefited from intense media coverage. This was augmented by controversy surrounding the annual Turner Prize, (one of Britain's few major awards for contemporary artists), which had several of the artists as nominees or winners. Channel 4 had become a sponsor of the competition, leading to television profiles of the artists in prime-time slots.
Becoming the establishment
The consolidation of the artists' status began in 1995 with a large-scale group exhibition Brilliant! held at the Walker Art Center a respected art museum in Minneapolis, USA. The term "yBa" was already used in 1994 and later used by Simon Ford in a feature "Myth Making" in March 1996 in Art Monthly magazine."About Art Monthly" , Art Monthly, retrieved 14 March 2010.
Art dealer Jay Jopling began to represent YBAs Jake & Dinos Chapman, Tracey Emin, Marcus Harvey, Damien Hirst, Gary Hume, Marc Quinn, Gavin Turk and Sam Taylor-Wood, whom he married in 1998. Before Jopling, Karsten Schubert was the most important dealer of artists that were later called YBAs. Shortly after Freeze he exhibited Ian Davenport, Gary Hume, and Michael Landy in November 1988, who all exhibited in Freeze, in his gallery.Blanché, Ulrich (2018). Damien Hirst. Gallery Art in a Material World. Baden-Baden, Tectum Verlag, p. 68.
In 1997, the Royal Academy staged an exhibition of the private art collection of Charles Saatchi titled Sensation, which included many works by YBA artists.