The YBA movement

In  1988, a new movement arose comprised of a new style of art. The group was known as the Young British Artists, with Damien Hirst as an unspoken leader. The big talk about these artists was their work’s shock factor. Whether they were revealing extremely personal details of their lives, showing off something grotesque, putting something simple that seemingly required no effort on display, or just generally pushing comfort boundaries, these artist were always stirring up the waters.

In the case of the infamous Damien Hirst he was most well known for his works with formaldehyde and dead animals. In one piece entitled Mother and Child (Divided) he put two cows, one older female and her child, cut in half, into big cases of formaldehyde. The controversy surrounding this was for two major reasons. One being the need for Hirst to display such a disturbingly Gorey piece and if that was necessary to get his point across, the other being whether he deserves the credit if his team did all the actual work of putting the piece together for him. What it actually seeks to represent is two forever separated and fatally severed and the impossibleness to maintain unity.

Similarly controversial are the works of Ron Mueck who used practices of hyperreality to shock viewers. The uncomfortable feeling his method of sculpting has is iconic. An example being his piece Big Baby II, which features a newborn baby, still marked and bloody from birth, in the nude. However this baby is excessively large and extremely detailed. It is used to represent the vulnerability and fragility of human life and the naturalness of a baby.