Young British Artists

Young British Artists or YBA is the name applied to a group of conceptual artists, painters, sculptors and installation artists based in the United Kingdom, most of whom attended Goldsmiths' College in London during the late 1980’s and early 1990’s. The phrase 'Young British Artists' was coined after a series of exhibitions held at the Saatchi Gallery, London from 1992 onwards, which attracted the attention of the public and eventually raised the participating artists and their acolytes to a status arguably largely on purely artistic merit, was undeserved. It was arguably a marketing tool to promote UK contemporary art during the 1990's. Strictly speaking, it includes only those artists who showed at Freeze, in 1988 or Sensation in 1997. However, the name is also used in a broader sense to embrace all progressive, avant-garde British artists who achieved recognition during that period. The participating and involved practitioners were mostly noted for their ability to shock in visual terms, many of them having studios in the re-gentrified Hoxton and Shoreditch area of London. They attained extensive media coverage and thus dominated British art during the 1990’s.

High profile artists within the group include Tracey Emin whose work ‘My Bed’ received as much scorn as praise as did Damien Hurst’s ‘The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living’ being a shark preserved in a solution of formaldehyde. The Young British Artists in their turn created or revamped a string of contemporary commercial galleries. These include Karsten Schubert, Victoria Miro and Jay Jopling's 'White Cube'. Slightly in advance of this Frieze Magazine was launched in the summer of 1991 and thoroughly embraced the doctrine of the YBA. Arguably the final integration into mainstream art happened in 1997 when the RA, always a stronghold of the staid and the safe, staged a major exhibition of these artists’ work. ‘Sensation’ caused a furore amongst the Academy’s elders, three of whom resigned in protest. In turn, as a protest to the radical London art scene in particular what the YBA stood for, an anti-conceptual group known as the Stuckists was formed.