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DICTIONARY

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Young British Artists (YBA)
YBA is an acronym of Young British Artists and refers to the generation of British, London-based artists who were lavished with attention in the mid-1990s.

They were so deliberately provocative in their treatment of their themes of choice – death, violence and sex – that their exhibitions elicited widespread interest from the media world. Suddenly artists became stars on a par with pop musicians and actors.

The "Sensation" exhibition featuring works from ad man Charles Saatchi's great collection at the Royal Academy in London in 1997 introduced YBA to a large audience. The exhibition sparked criticisms of this branch of contemporary art, many people feeling that the artists lacked morals and appreciation of the surrounding society.

Sarah Lucas, Tim Noble & Sue Webster, Damien Hirst


Young Wild Ones, The / The New Wild Ones
From the German: Die Neue Wilden. Around 1980 a group of German artists worked with painting executed in expressive and vivid colours with distinctive figurations which they had drawn from art history and contemporary culture, consumerism, pop, etc.

In Denmark the movement emerged with a group of artists from the Royal Danish Academy of Art whose breakthrough exhibition was "The Knife on the Head" in 1982. The exhibition's title was taken from a painting by Kehnet Nielsen with the same name.
See also Postmodernism.

Peter Bonde, Claus Carstensen/Superflex, Tal R, Elisabeth Toubro, Troels Wörsel