End of a Century 1990–2000

Sutapa Biswas, To Touch Stone  1989–90

To Touch Stone 1989–90 is a large-scale drawing by Sutapa Biswas of a reclining naked woman (the artist’s sister) occupying nine sheets of paper arranged in a three-by-three grid. The image of the figure is both formed and unformed, with elements of the body existing only in outline (arms, legs, hair and breasts) with the face and genital area being most fully realised. The figure lies flat, diagonally stretched across the work with the feet at the bottom left corner and the head in the top right. Two sheets are completely blank (top left and middle left), while the ground on which the figure rests is delineated not by line but by a flowing ribbon of words that occupy the lower middle right sheets and the middle right sheets. These words read:

Tracey Emin, Exploration of the Soul  1994

This work comprises framed sheets of blue A4 notepaper on which Emin has written a poetic text recounting significant moments in her life up until the age of thirteen. It begins with a celebration of the endless cycle of life represented by nature (the sea, the stars, the sun, the earth’s rotation) and human love-making, as an introduction to the passionate encounter in which the artist imagines her and her twin brother Paul’s conception. The following page describes birth, laying the ground for future depression: ‘The moment of my birth into/ this world I somehow felt a mistake/ had been made – I couldn’t scream or/ cry or even argue my case – I/ just lay there motionless just wishing/ I could just go back – Back to where/ I had came [sic]’. The tension arising from the coupling of beauty and pleasure with pain continues throughout the text as Emin describes the twins’ uncanny closeness and their frustration at being too special and too spoilt. She recounts their adventures growing up at the ‘giant’ Hotel International, where they had moved at the age of six as a result of her parents’ unorthodox relationship: a love affair between an English woman and a Turkish Cypriot property-developer, both married to other people. The pregnancy resulting in Emin and her brother was an accident and was nearly aborted. In Emin’s text, the end of the Hotel International idyll and her parents’ relationship leads to sexual experimentation between the children and disturbing attentions from her mother’s new lover, heralding the beginnings of anxiety and despair. As they grow up, the twins gradually grow apart, the separation an inevitable source of pain. Ridicule and rejection from other children, sexual exploitation by a ‘big brown hairy man’ and the loss of her front teeth after being head butted by Paul precede the traumatic culminating event of the text. The artist’s rape at the age of thirteen had a devastating emotional effect: ‘for me my childhood was over – I had/ become conscious of my own physicality – Aware/ of my single presence – I had become open/ to the ugly truths of this world –/ And at the age of thirteen I realized there was a/ danger in beauty and innocents [sic] – I could not/ have both –/ This would be something I would/ battle with for the rest of/ my life.’

Chris Ofili, No Woman, No Cry  1998

No Woman No Cry is a tribute to the London teenager Stephen Lawrence who was murdered in a racially motivated attack in 1993. A public inquiry into the murder investigation concluded that the Metropolitan police force was institutionally racist. The woman depicted is Stephen’s mother, Doreen. In each of her tears is a collaged image of Stephen Lawrence’s face, while the words ‘R.I.P. Stephen Lawrence’ are just visible beneath the layers of paint. As well as this specific reference, the artist intended the painting to be read as a universal portrayal of melancholy and grief. Ofili titled the work after the 1974 song by Jamaican musician Bob Marley.

Gallery label, October 2022

Lucian Freud, Leigh Bowery  1991

This is a small portrait of the maverick gay performer and nightclub personality, Leigh Bowery, who died in 1994. The extraordinary costumes he created for himself played on fashion, fetishism and carnival aesthetics, which transformed his sixteen stones of flesh into an androgynous spectacle.Freud met him in 1988 and for four years painted him regularly. He was fascinated by Bowery’s bulky physique and his awareness of the body as a sculptural object. In this painting, Freud shows him close-up and naked. The vulnerability of the sleeping figure lends the painting a touching intimacy.

Gallery label, July 2007

Damien Hirst, Away from the Flock  1994

Away from the Flock is a floor-based sculpture consisting of a glass-walled tank filled with formaldehyde solution in which a dead sheep is fixed so that it appears to be alive and caught in movement. Thick white frames surround and support the tank, setting in brilliant relief the transparent turquoise of the solution in which the sheep is immersed. Away from the Flock is unusual for a Hirst sculpture in that it exists in three versions, all created the same year, of which ARTIST ROOM’s is the third. The principal difference between the three versions (reproduced together Hirst and Burn, pp.84–5) is that the sheep in the first version has an entirely black head and its forelegs are raised further off the floor of the tank, so that it appears to be arrested mid-jump. The sheep in versions two and three are more similar in appearance and in pose; ARTIST ROOM’s sheep has less black on its head and a pinker tinge in the rest of its wool than the others.

Gillian Wearing CBE, ‘I’m desperate’  1992–3

The series of photographs called Signs... brought Wearing international recognition when it was first exhibited in 1993. This selection of five images shows the range of responses which Wearing elicited from passers-by, whom she selected at random, and asked to write their thoughts on a piece of paper. Wearing challenges social stereotypes and assumptions, and often works in collaboration with members of the public as a means of 'interrupting the logic of photo-documentary and snapshot photography.' She has said 'A great deal of my work is about questioning handed-down truths.'

Gallery label, September 2004

Jenny Saville, Trace  1993–4

Mona Hatoum, Present Tense  1996

This olive oil soap is a traditional Palestinian product which has been produced since the 10th century in Nablus, a town north of Jerusalem. Mona Hatoum drew on the soap blocks by pushing tiny red glass beads into their surface. The drawing depicts the map of the 1993 Oslo Peace Accord between Israel and Palestine, with the beads outlining the territories to be handed back to the Palestinian authority. Hatoum highlights the fleeting impermanence of official borders, in contrast to the lasting history of the Palestinian people.

Gallery label, February 2024

Rachel Whiteread, Torso  1988

Torso 1988 is a sculpture in plaster, cast from the inside of a hot water bottle. In 1988, a year after graduating from the Slade School of Art in London, Whiteread held her first solo exhibition at the Carlisle Gallery, London, showing the four works that began her exploration of small domestic objects and items of furniture: the cast of the underside of a bed, Shallow Breath 1988, the cast of a small cupboard covered in black felt, Closet 1988, and the cast of a mid-century woman’s dressing table with glass top reattached to the plaster cast, Mantle 1988. Torso 1988 was the fourth piece included in this exhibition. The works encapsulated the interests that were to define Whiteread’s career over the next thirty years – the process of casting forgotten space, an experimental use of materials and casting techniques, and the emotional power of everyday objects.

Peter Doig, Echo Lake  1998

Echo Lake is a large, dark painting of a scene at night. Like many of Doig’s paintings of the late 1990s, it is landscape in format, with a composition based on horizontal bands of colour overlaid with detail. The painting is bisected by a line of white representing the shore of a lake. Above it is a band of earth and scrubby vegetation painted in white and pastel colours. This area is illuminated by the headlamps of an American-style police car located at the centre-right of the image. The bright lights on the car’s roof are roughly level with the top of the vegetation. Above this point, filling the top third of the painting, is an area of purplish black. A few twinkling lights suggest distant habitations. On the right side of the painting, the trunks of trees growing above the shoreline are partially illuminated. Their branches extend up into the darkness. They are compositionally balanced by a telegraph pole on the left side of the painting at the level of the road on which the police car is parked. A man wearing black trousers, a white shirt and a narrow black tie (presumably a policeman) stands at the lakeshore looking out of the painting towards the viewer. His hands encircle his face and his mouth is an o-shape indicating that he is shouting out into the dark lake. The title suggests that nothing comes back to him but his own voice. The bottom half of the painting represents a blurry mirror image of the landscape above the shoreline. This mirrored reflection provides the visual version of an echo.

R.B. Kitaj, The Wedding  1989–93

In this painting, Kitaj captures various moments from his wedding to fellow artist Sandra Fisher (1947–1994). The artist, on the right side, wears the traditional shawl of Jewish bridegrooms, and leans forward to embrace Sandra. On the left, wearing a top hat, is the Rabbi Abraham Levy. Under the chuppah (canopy), are his children and several artists. Lucian Freud (1922–2011) is on the left, Frank Auerbach (born 1931) in the middle and David Hockney (born 1937), the best man, is on the right, referencing the artistic community which he built around himself. The Wedding brings together key themes in Kitaj’s art and thought, including his increasing awareness of his identity as a Jewish man and the notion of diaspora that is important in Jewish thought, experience and identity.

Gallery label, October 2022

Sarah Lucas, Pauline Bunny  1997

This floppy figure relates to ‘bunny girl’ waitresses at Playboy clubs, whose uniform involves stockings and rabbit ears. Lucas’s version undermines any sense of glamour. It was originally exhibited with seven similar figures arranged around a snooker table. Their dangling limbs suggested powerless femininity, while the snooker table stood for masculine demonstrations of skill. Lucas draws on the language and imagery of her working-class London background to challenge the ‘male gaze’ that views merely women as sexual objects.

Gallery label, May 2019