1990s
Art and architecture made in the 1990s: new global biennials, work on identity and memory, the Young British Artists and spectacular museums.
No works indexed yet · 10 related artists
No open-access works for 1990s are in the index yet. They will appear here as more collections are indexed.
About
The end of the Cold War and the spread of the internet made the art of the 1990s newly international. Biennials multiplied, from Johannesburg to Gwangju, and artists from China, Africa and Latin America reached wider audiences. In Beijing, Zhang Huan sat smeared with honey and fish oil in a public latrine for 12 Square Meters (1994), and Cai Guo-Qiang set off gunpowder explosions across landscapes.
Identity and memory were central. Carrie Mae Weems built her Kitchen Table Series (1990) around a single table, Kara Walker cut black paper silhouettes exposing the violence of slavery, and Félix González-Torres let visitors take sweets from a pile matching the weight of his partner, who died of AIDS. In Britain, Rachel Whiteread cast the empty space of a room in plaster for Ghost (1990). Luc Tuymans and Neo Rauch revived figurative painting in muted or dreamlike registers, and Frank Gehry's titanium-clad Guggenheim Bilbao (1997) made architecture a spectacle.
