Opening from the 13th of January 2022, the Isle of Man Arts Council is delighted to present New Works, a curated exhibition looking at new pieces recently purchased by the Arts Council and the influential legacy of the Young British Artist movement of the 1990s. This exhibition includes works by Tracey Emin, Jenny Saville, Marc Quinn and Manx artist Kevin Atherton and marks the first time that these works have been publicly displayed on the island.
The Young British Artists, or YBAs 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.
Many of the artists were initially supported and their works collected by Charles Saatchi.
Tracey Emin’s expressive and visceral art is one of disclosure, dealing with personal experience and heightened states of emotion. Frank and intimate but universal in its relevance, her work draws on the fundamental themes of love, desire, loss and grief, unravelling in the process the nuanced constructs of ‘woman’ and ‘self’ through probing self-exploration. ‘The most beautiful thing is honesty, even if it’s really painful to look at’, she has remarked.
In her depictions of the human form, Jenny Saville transcends the boundaries of both classical figuration and modern abstraction. Oil paint, applied in heavy layers, becomes as visceral as flesh itself, each painted mark maintaining a supple, mobile life of its own. As Saville pushes, smears, and scrapes the pigment over her large-scale canvases, the distinctions between living, breathing bodies and their painted representations begin to collapse.
Marc Quinn is a leading contemporary artist. He first came to prominence in the early 1990s, when he and several peers redefined what it was to make and experience contemporary art. Marc Quinn makes art about what it is to be a person living in the world – whether it concerns Man’s relationship with nature and how that is mediated by human desire; or what identity and beauty mean and why people are compelled to transform theirs; or representing current, social history in his work. His work also connects frequently and meaningfully with art history, from Modern masters right back to antiquity.
Kevin Atherton is an International artist from the Isle of Man whose practice includes performance, sculpture, film and video, installation and site-specific public art.
He was notably, the Head of Department of Alternative Media at Chelsea College of Art, which later; when it merged with Print Making, then under the leadership of Jeff Edwards, became Combined Media. He has exhibited and performed throughout the world including at the Museum of Modern Art San Francisco (SFMOMA), The Museum of Modern Art Vienna (MUMOK) and at Tate Britain. His two-screen video installation In Two Minds (1978-2014) is in the collection of the Irish Museum of Modern Art Dublin.
In November 2016, his artwork Platforms Piece, comprising three bronze sculptures of commuters on the platforms of Brixton railway station, was given listed status by Historic England. It was commissioned by British Rail in 1986, and two of the figures are believed to be the "first public sculptural representations of black British people in the UK".
