The Little Artists are John Cake and Darren Neave. They create versions of well known contemporary artworks and art personalities in miniature using toy Lego bricks. They also produce a range of merchandise. They describe themselves as conceptual artists. Their work is collected by Charles Saatchi.
They studied Fine Art at Leeds University. They have been collecting Lego for over 20 years, and started from when they were children. They buy all the new sets that are produced and also buy off the internet. A figure of Salvador Dalí, for example, was made by combining the Harry Potter set with the standard "woman's hair" and a conquistador's face from an old pirate set. They started seriously making the Lego pieces in 2003, but their first attempt was earlier:
We'd made Damien Hirst's shark tank as students because we were very bored and we wanted to be on a par with someone as great as Damien Hirst who's done so much. We just feel like the owners of a contemporary art gallery now, with our Hirst, Koons and Dalí. [1]
Their first show in a public gallery was Art Craziest Nation (named after Matthew Collings' book, Art Crazy Nation) at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool from August 2005 for five months. [2] The artists created an art show in miniature. Titles of the works shown (all made from Lego) included Hirst's Shark Tank, Warhol's Money, Andre's Bricks, Craig-Martin's Tree, Beuys' Sleighs, Emin's Bed and Chapmans' Dead Guys. Some pieces are now on display as part of the Gallery's permanent collection.
Their work includes "Lick Your Selves", edible frozen versions of Marc Quinn's Self sculpture. This was on show in Brighton in 2006 and Sheffield Blocspace 2005. [3]
In November 2005 they staged a show called Contemporary Artists Play Pictionary at the Agency Contemporary Gallery in London. They described this as "part-installation, part-performance, part-curatorial". Over 50 artists took part in a round of Pictionary, a game where a word has to be communicated in a drawing. The drawings were signed and then auctioned to benefit the National Autistic Society. Participating artists included Tracey Emin, Billy Childish, Gavin Turk, Mark Wallinger, Charles Thomson, Georgina Starr and Mark Quinn.
They are currently using Smurfs, Martin Kippenberger and Batman as reference points in new work.
The Little Artists work from a studio in London. Their studio is known as "The Red Studio" after the painting by Matisse.
Stuckism is an international art movement founded in 1999 by Billy Childish and Charles Thomson to promote figurative painting as opposed to conceptual art. By May 2017 the initial group of 13 British artists had expanded to 236 groups in 52 countries.
The Young British Artists, or YBAs—also referred to as Brit artists and Britart—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.
Tracey Karima Emin, CBE, RA is a British artist known for her autobiographical and confessional artwork. Emin produces work in a variety of media including drawing, painting, sculpture, film, photography, neon text and sewn appliqué. Once the "enfant terrible" of the Young British Artists in the 1980s, Tracey Emin is now a Royal Academician.
Damien Steven Hirst is an English artist, entrepreneur, and art collector. He is one of the Young British Artists (YBAs) who dominated the art scene in the UK during the 1990s. He is reportedly the United Kingdom's richest living artist, with his wealth estimated at $384 million in the 2020 Sunday Times Rich List. During the 1990s his career was closely linked with the collector Charles Saatchi, but increasing frictions came to a head in 2003 and the relationship ended.
The Saatchi Gallery is a London gallery for contemporary art and anindependent charity opened by Charles Saatchi in 1985. Exhibitions which drew upon the collection of Charles Saatchi, starting with US artists and minimalism, moving to the Damien Hirst-led Young British Artists, followed by shows purely of painting, led to Saatchi Gallery becoming a recognised authority in contemporary art globally. It has occupied different premises, first in North London, then the South Bank by the River Thames, and finally in Chelsea, Duke of York's HQ, its current location. In 2019 Saatchi Gallery became a registered charity and begun a new chapter in its history. Recent exhibitions include the major solo exhibition of the artist JR, JR: Chronicles, and London Grads Now in September 2019 lending the gallery spaces to graduates from leading fine art schools who experienced the cancellation of physical degree shows due to the pandemic.
Marcus Harvey is an English artist and painter, one of the Young British Artists (YBAs).
The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art is part of the National Galleries of Scotland, which are based in Edinburgh, Scotland. The National Gallery of Modern Art houses the collection of modern and contemporary art dating from about 1900 to the present in two buildings, Modern One and Modern Two, that face each other on Belford Road to the west of the city centre.
Sarah Lucas is an English artist. She is part of the generation of Young British Artists who emerged during the 1990s. Her works frequently employ visual puns and bawdy humour by incorporating photography, collage and found objects.
White Cube is a contemporary art gallery owned by Jay Jopling with two branches in London: Mason's Yard in central London and Bermondsey in South East London and one in Central, Hong Kong Island. The gallery also has office locations and viewing rooms at 10 avenue Matignon in Paris and 699 Madison Avenue in New York's Upper East Side. The Hoxton Square space in the East End of London was closed at the end of 2012 and the São Paulo gallery in 2015.
Sensation was an exhibition of the collection of contemporary art owned by Charles Saatchi, including many works by Young British Artists, (YBAs), which first took place 18 September – 28 December 1997 at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. The exhibition later toured to the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin and the Brooklyn Museum in New York City. A proposed showing at the National Gallery of Australia was cancelled when the gallery's director decided the exhibition was "too close to the market."
Carl Freedman is the founder of Carl Freedman Gallery. He previously worked as a writer and a curator.
Adrian Searle is the chief art critic of The Guardian newspaper in Britain, and has been writing for the paper since 1996. Previously he was a painter.
Sarah Kent is a British art critic, formerly art editor of the weekly London 'what's on' guide Time Out. She was an early supporter of the Young British Artists in general, and Tracey Emin in particular, helping her to get exposure. This has led to polarised reactions of praise and opposition for Kent. She adopts a feminist stance and has stated her position to be that of "a spokesperson, especially for women artists, in a country that is essentially hostile to contemporary art."
Neo-conceptual art describes art practices in the 1980s and particularly 1990s to date that derive from the conceptual art movement of the 1960s and 1970s. These subsequent initiatives have included the Moscow Conceptualists, United States neo-conceptualists such as Sherrie Levine and the Young British Artists, notably Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin in the United Kingdom, where there is also a Stuckism counter-movement and criticism from the 1970s conceptual art group Art and Language.
Ged Quinn is an English artist and musician. He studied at the Ruskin School of Art and St Anne's College in Oxford, the Slade School of Art in London, the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. He now lives and works in the UK.
The Stuckism International Gallery was the gallery of the Stuckist art movement. It was open from 2002 to 2005 in Shoreditch, and was run by Charles Thomson, the co-founder of Stuckism. It was launched by a procession carrying a coffin marked "The death of conceptual art" to the neighbouring White Cube gallery.
The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living is an artwork created in 1991 by Damien Hirst, an English artist and a leading member of the "Young British Artists". It consists of a preserved tiger shark submerged in formaldehyde in a glass-panel display case. It was originally commissioned in 1991 by Charles Saatchi, who sold it in 2004 to Steven A. Cohen for an undisclosed amount, widely reported to have been at least $8 million. However, the title of Don Thompson's book, The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art, suggests a higher figure.
The Zillah Bell Art Gallery is an independent contemporary art gallery housed in a Grade II Listed Building in Thirsk, North Yorkshire, England. Opened in 1988, the gallery exhibits local and national artists including Norman Ackroyd, Deirdre Borlase, Colin Britton, Mike Clay, Robin Hazlewood, Jason Hicklin, Roger Kohn, Janet Moodie and Jonathan Trowell.
John Albert Walker is a British art critic and historian who has written over 15 books on modern and contemporary art with an emphasis on mass media. He has also written on design history methodology. Walker's books include Art since Pop (1975), Design History and the History of Design with Judy Attfield (1990), John Latham: The Incidental Person - His Art and Ideas (1994), Cultural Offensive: America's Impact on British Art since 1945 (1998), Art & Outrage (1999), Supercollector: A Critique of Charles Saatchi with Rita Hatton (2000), Left Shift: Radical Art in 1970s Britain (2001), Art in the Age of Mass Media, Art and Celebrity (2003), and Firefighters in Art and Media: A Pictorial History (2009).