From Postwar Sculpture to the YBAs

British art reached international standing after the war through sculpture — Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore first, with a carved, monumental abstraction that gave the field its first global audience. Britain’s contribution to Pop Art then arrived from an unexpected direction: Richard Hamilton coined the term itself in a 1957 letter, years before Warhol’s soup cans, and David Hockney carried it furthest, his LA pools and portraits closer to English satire than to American consumer branding.

The late 1960s brought a genuinely conceptual turn. In 1967, Richard Long walked a straight line across a field and photographed the flattened grass, reconceiving sculpture as event rather than object — around the same time, fellow St Martin’s students Gilbert & George began presenting themselves as “living sculpture,” dissolving the boundary between artist and artwork from 1969 onward.

Two decades later, in 1988, a group of largely unknown Goldsmiths students organised by Damien Hirst staged Freeze in a disused London Docklands warehouse — the exhibition credited with launching the Young British Artists. Hirst, Tracey Emin and Chris Ofili became its most internationally visible figures, pursuing radically different concerns under a shared cultural moment defined as much by media attention as by aesthetics. The full story is in our Young British Artists editorial.

The Return to Painting

Figurative painting never went away in Britain. The School of London — Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach and their circle — held the line through abstraction’s postwar peak, building thickly worked, psychologically unflinching portraits and insisting, against the critical tide, that paint applied by hand remained capable of genuine discovery.

By the 1990s, a new generation extended that conviction internationally. Peter Doig, working between Trinidad, Canada and London, built memory-inflected landscapes from blurred, half-remembered imagery. Cecily Brown, trained at the Slade and based in New York since the 1990s, brought a charged, gestural painterliness to the figure that owed as much to de Kooning as to any British tradition. Neither worked through YBA-style provocation — both insisted that painting itself, pursued with sustained ambition, remained a serious critical proposition.

Even within the YBA generation, painting proved harder to dismiss than the movement’s reputation for installation and spectacle suggests. Ofili built densely layered, pattern-saturated canvases incorporating references to Black cultural history and, famously, elephant dung — painting treated as material accumulation rather than restraint. Jenny Saville confronted the body at monumental scale, extending Freud’s psychological weight into a contemporary register. Gary Hume took the opposite route, reducing his subjects to flat, glossy planes of household paint — proof that the return to painting produced no single style, only a shared insistence that the medium still had unresolved questions.

Famous British Contemporary Artists

These are the British and English artists most often named when the field is discussed, and most of them are represented here in signed editions.

David Hockney — six decades of printmaking alongside the painting, from the 1960s etchings to the iPad drawings.

Damien Hirst — spots, butterflies and pharmaceutical cabinets, with an editioned practice pursued as deliberately as the sculpture.

Peter Doig — Scottish-born painter of landscapes remembered rather than observed; the prints hold the same half-recalled atmosphere.

Tracey Emin — confession as material: neon, monoprint and embroidered text, private experience made public without apology.

Cecily Brown — painting that keeps dissolving between figuration and abstraction and settles in neither.

Chris Ofili — layered, luminous surfaces that brought dot patterns, glitter and dung into a discourse with no place for them.

Richard Long — walking as sculpture, where the photograph or the printed text is the only form the artwork can take.

Beyond those seven, the collection holds Gilbert & George, David Shrigley, Grayson Perry, Harland Miller and Tony Cragg, alongside the generation rewriting British painting now — France-Lise McGurn, Louise Giovanelli and Jadé Fadojutimi.

Signed, original British art prints for sale here span sculpture to painting to performance, from around €900 to the mid five figures, with most editions between €2,600 and €6,000. Artworks are held in the permanent collections of Tate, MoMA and the Centre Pompidou.