Video Work Exhibited in 'Common People Arte Inglese Tra Fenomeno E Realtà', Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Per L' Arte, Torino, Italy (12 June - 19 September 1999) curated by Francesco Bonami

Billingham, Richard ORCID: 0000-0002-6474-5656 (1999) Video Work Exhibited in 'Common People Arte Inglese Tra Fenomeno E Realtà', Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Per L' Arte, Torino, Italy (12 June - 19 September 1999) curated by Francesco Bonami. [Show/Exhibition]

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Image Exhibition Catalogue to 'Common People Arte Inglese Tra Fenomeno E Realtà', Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Per L' Arte, Torino, Italy (12 June - 19 September 1999) curated by Francesco Bonami.jpg - Draft Version Download (63kB) | Preview

Abstract

Early video work was exhibited in 'Common People Arte Inglese Tra Fenomeno E Realtà', Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Per L' Arte, Torino, Italy (12 June - 19 September 1999 curated by Francesco Bonami. This exhibition was dedicated to English art and picked up a thread already started by the Foundation with an English Art exhibition, presented in Sant'Antonino di Susa first and then at the Galleria Civica in Modena in May 1995. On that occasion, a cross-section of the most innovative and emerging trends in contemporary English art was investigated, from "masters" like Tony Cragg, Richard Deacon and Richard Wentworth to the later artists like Rachel Whiteread, Damien Hirst and Douglas Gordon. Then Arte Ingles had a clear look at the foundations from which the British 'Art invasion' would start; Common People deepens that look, going beyond the surface of sensationalism to discover the nerves of a society, the British one, in full transformation. Ordinary people or heroes? The 1990s English artists seemed to oscillate within this creative and social problem. The famous YBAs - Young British Artists - an artistic phenomenon of the 1990s, in 1999 were no longer so young. The British phenomenon that shook the contemporary art world seems to have exploded with the Sensation exhibition organized by the Saatchi Collection at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. Common People observed the phenomenon and attempted a thorough analysis of the origins, of the results and heritage of the phenomenon and of the euphoric atmosphere that developed around it in the contemporary artistic culture of the United Kingdom. The Common People title was borrowed from a song by Pulp, which anticipated in words the dilemma that made British art a tool to undermine the social hierarchies of a controversial and provocative culture that struggled, however, to free itself from commonplaces increasingly conservative and conventional. A culture made up of ordinary people who, through their ideas and their art, looked to themselves and to the world that contained them, trying to understand each other and transform themselves in hope and with the desire to change both. Common People was not an attempt to suddenly revise a recent narrative. The idea of the exhibition was to highlight the different layers of the contemporary art situation. Other artists were Darren Almond, Ian Breakwell, Angela Bulloch, Saul Fletcher, Douglas Gordon, Paul Graham, Damien Hirst, Gary Hume, Sarah Lucas, Christina Mackie, Maria Marshall, Steve McQueen, Julian Opie, Steven Pippin, Sophy Rickett, David Shrigley , Sam Taylor-Wood, Gillian Wearing.

Item Type:	Show/Exhibition
Subjects:	N Fine Arts > N Visual arts (General) For photography, see TR
Divisions:	Schools and Research Institutes > School of Creative Arts
Research Priority Areas:	Creative Practice and Theory
Depositing User:	Richard Billingham
Date Deposited:	31 Oct 2019 13:48
Last Modified:	31 Aug 2023 09:24
URI:	https://eprints.glos.ac.uk/id/eprint/7442

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