Room: 1990s

So we are in the gallery that is looking very closely at the work made in the 1990s which of course has become very synonymous with the Young British Artists who emerged at this time It is also important to remember that London really emerged as a multi cultural city and was very much heralded as a new centre for contemporary art. So as well as being an important centre for art London as a subject was a recurring fascination for artists during this period and I'm standing in front of Leon Kossof’s painting of Christchurch in Spitalfields. In this painting, he depicts the church leaning very heavily to the right in order to allow the sort of social fabric if you like, of the city to emerge. And I think the very energetic brushwork really does suggest that time is really of the essence that it won't be too long before churches like this become surrounded by new office blocks and that their characters will be lost forever. It's very interesting that we’ve tried to juxtapose an older artist’s depiction of London with a painting by a much younger artist who emerged at this time. This is Keith Coventry, 'East Street Estate' from 1994 and on first glance this painting looks perhaps a lot like abstract painting from the very early Twentieth Century perhaps, by Russian artists like Malevich. But in actual fact, these very abstract, very simple markings depict the plan of the East Street Council Estate in South London and show us where the buildings are situated on a very simplified map. Chris Ofili emerged in the 1990s with paintings like this; 'No Woman No Cry' which really pulsate with the colour and energy of the artist’s brushwork to which he adds intricate layers of resin, colleague magazine cut outs. This painting was conceived as a tribute to the murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence and after a formative trip to Zimbabwe as a student, Ofili started to investigate elephant dung as a potential media in his art and soon afterwards he began to apply balls of dung sourced from London Zoo onto the surfaces of his canvasses and also as a prop to prop the works up from the floor. And Ofili’s canvasses from this period have a range of disparate sources including contemporary and popular culture and he often has talked about how he approaches a painting like a hip-hop DJ or a rapper, you know, sort of sampling and mixing disparate elements in order to make something new. I think this room really captures the spirit of the many different ways that artists were seeking to communicate their ideas to a wider public which I think is something that really epitomises work from the 1990s.