When Brit was It

Suddenly, in the first few years of the final decade of the Twentieth Century, art in Britain became vitally important again, both at home and abroad…

During the 1990s, a group of young artists swiftly rose to prominence in the UK. Championed by the Saatchi Gallery and monopolising the Turner Prize scene, they briefly achieved a cultural standing on par with soap actors and pop stars. The newspapers loved to lampoon their often challenging art, but it seems the Great British public embraced their wild weirdness and for a time, art was foremost in the public consciousness...

A few high-profile pieces became emblematic of the movement and have endured, often by changing form and format. Likewise, a few of those artists are even more important now than they were thirty years ago. Here, we present an overview of the key works that helped to set the tone and define an era when being Brit, was really ‘it’ for the art world…

Field

In a series of installations, Antony Gormley has presented crowds of small humanoid clay figures. In each installation, these figures, often numbering hundreds of thousands and ranging in height from eight to twenty-eight centimetres, entirely fill the floor of the space.

They are roughly made figures in unglazed clay and have been formed by communities from around the world. Each group included families and people of all ages from six upward, the clay was…