In 1965, the Walker Art Center presented the work of 13 young British artists in the exhibition London: The New Scene. In recent years, international art magazines have been attempting to come to grips with the explosion of work from the British art scene. The Walker is the first major museum to mount a sweeping review of this provocative work with "Brilliant!" New Art from London, organized by Chief Curator Richard Flood. Heralded by The Independent on Sunday as the highlight of the 1995 art season, the exhibition features 22 young artists internationally acknowledged as among the most exciting working today. "Brilliant!" New Art from London will be on view October 22, 1995-January 7, 1996. The artists chosen for the exhibition have become increasingly visible over the past six years in self-promoted, renegade exhibitions and publications that have cropped up throughout London. Their aesthetically diverse and provocative artworks are united by a shared interest in ephemeral materials, unconventional presentation, and an anti-authoritarian stance that lends their objects a youthful, aggressive vitality. Ranging in age from 22 to 35, most of the artists are graduates of a handful of London art schools (notably Goldsmiths' College and the Slade School of Fine Art), which have provided a fertile ground for the development of emerging artists in the late 1980s and early 1990s. At the end of the 1980s, faced with a flattened art market and a sense that the aesthetic options open to them were extremely limited, these artists adopted an entrepreneurial attitude of collective self-promotion evident in such exhibitions as Freeze (1988), organized by then-Goldsmiths' student Damien Hirst and held in a rundown warehouse on the Surrey Docks of East London. A seminal event in this history, Freeze demonstrated the independence, self-reliance, and intense professionalism of these young students. "Brilliant!" New Art from London will be comprised of approximately 100 works of widely diverse and hybrid media, including painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, video, photography, and CD-ROM by Henry Bond, Glenn Brown, Dinos Chapman, Jake Chapman, Adam Chodzko, Mat Collishaw, Tracey Emin, Angus Fairhurst, Anya Gallaccio, Liam Gillick, Damien Hirst, Gary Hume, Michael Landy, Abigail Lane, Sarah Lucas, Chris Ofili, Steven Pippin, Alessandro Raho, Georgina Starr, Sam Taylor-Wood, Gillian Wearing, and Rachel Whiteread. Rachel Whiteread and Damien Hirst both share a relationship to Minimalism, but twist it back toward the social. Whiteread has come to prominence for her castings of the negative space of rooms, bathtubs, beds, and even a house. Her Untitled (Room) (1993), a cast of the interior of a room, recently earned her the much coveted Turner Prize. Also on view will be Hirst's The Acquired Inability to Escape, Inverted (1993), a large vitrine with an office desk, chair, and ashtray suspended from its ceiling. Providing a commentary on class structures in England, the business world is here invoked as a site of surveillance, exclusion, and suffocating conformity. Photography and video also play a central role in "Brilliant!" New Art from London. On view will be the photographic series Documents (1991-1994) by Henry Bond and Liam Gillick, a collaborative photo-text installation archived in a filing cabinet with a card catalog to be used by the public in a library-like situation.

Brilliant! New Art from London

Stuart Morgan

Richard Flood

Neville Wakefield

Arts & Photography

Walker Art Center

The fourth installment of Matthew Barney's ongoing series of Cremaster "operas, " Cremaster 2 is loosely based on the life of serial killer Gary Gilmore. This time out, Barney filmed in the Salt Flats of Utah, the Columbia Icefield in Canada, and New York City. The scenario revolves around Gilmore's fascination with his alleged maternal grandfather, Harry Houdini, and his desire to join Houdini in the afterlife. Cremaster 4, the first in the series, was commissioned in 1995 and shot on the Isle of Man. The second, Cremaster 1, was shot in Boise, Idaho and appeared later that same year as part of a larger exhibition of the artist's work at the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen. Cremaster 5, released in 1997, was filmed in Budapest and shown commercially at the Film Forum in New York City. With this latest installment in the Cremaster series, Barney is sure to challenge and perplex, delight and intrigue his growing audience.

Cremaster 2

Matthew Barney

History & Criticism

One of the premier institutions of contemporary art in the country, the Walker Art Center also holds an important collection of over 11,000 objects from the early twentieth century to the present. These holdings reflect the Center's renowned multidisciplinary program, and include paintings, sculpture, prints, photography, film, video, installations and digital arts that range in date from classic early Modernist to cutting edge contemporary.

Bits & Pieces Put Together To Present A Semblance Of A Whole: Walker Art Center Collections

Siri Engberg

Douglas Fogle

Joan Rothfuss

Elizabeth Carpenter

Olukemi Ilesanmi

Philippe Vergne

The simplicity of collage, together with its strong graphic presence, lent the medium a sense of revolutionary possibility when it was first adopted by avant-garde artists almost 100 years ago. During the twentieth century collage gradually became identified with such artistic practices as Cubism, Dada and Surrealism, and today it has gained new momentum as an energetic art form with a strong political dimension. This stunning book explores the role of collage in contemporary visual culture. Featuring the work of both established talents and a new generation of artists, it examines how collage is used to confront and comment on a world that is dominated by the mass media and obsessed with conspicuous consumerism. Includes the work of Thomas Hirschhorn, Kim Jones, Wangechi Mutu, Martha Rosler, Nancy Spero and John Stezaker.

Collage: The Unmonumental Picture

Laura Hoptman

Massimilliano Gioni

Other Media

Merrell Pub Ltd

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Books by Richard Flood