The British Council teams in Uzbekistan and Wider Europe collaborated with The Gallery of Art of Uzbekistan and British Council Visual Arts in the UK to present the first ever exhibition of contemporary British art in Uzbekistan. 

Entitled New Past - Contemporary Art from the UK, the exhibition brings together artworks from the British Council Collection and is a key part of the 20th anniversary celebrations of the British Council in Uzbekistan. New Past is co-curated by Uzbek curator Gayane Umerova and Fay Blanchard, one of the curators from the British Council Visual Arts team based in London.

NEW PAST features 19 artists from the British Council Collection in a survey celebrating the breadth and energy of artistic practice in Britain over approximately the last two decades.  

The exhibition presents the work of the ‘YBAs’ or ‘Young British Artists’, including Damien Hirst, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Gavin Turk and Sarah Lucas. The term ‘YBA’ was applied to a loose group of British artists who began to exhibit collectively in 1988 and became known for their openness to materials and forms, as well as their entrepreneurial attitude.

The exhibition features works by several winners and nominees of the Turner Prize - Britain’s leading visual arts prize - including Rachel Whiteread, Martin Creed, Martin Boyce, Cornelia Parker and George Shaw. Alongside these, NEW PAST introduces the next generation of artists to be celebrated in Britain, such as Hayley Tompkins, Marcus Coates, Simon Ling and Toby Ziegler. Their works are both visually and conceptually compelling, often incorporating figurative and painterly means.

NEW PAST explores how British artists are continuing the tradition of previous generations, while seeking to create art that is relevant to today by using new materials and looking afresh at subjects such as landscape, still life and the human body. The fast pace of this artistic development, alongside changes in other areas of contemporary life, has meant that some of these recently made pieces are now considered iconic.

Often using humour, the absurd and a vernacular language, the exhibited artists connect with the viewer through familiar imagery and materials, from chairs to medicine, hot water bottles to signage. Many of the works in NEW PAST refer to issues outside artistic practice, including nature and the consequences of human engagement with the natural world. Rather than making specific statements, NEW PAST aims to open a door to ways of looking at our past, present and future.

Collection Artist(s)

Glossary

  • Contemporary

    Existing or coming into being at the same period; of today or of the present. The term that designates art being made today.

  • Curator

    A person who creates exhibitions or who is employed to look after and research museum objects.

  • Landscape

    Landscape is one of the principle genres of Western art. In early paintings the landscape was a backdrop for the composition, but in the late 17th Century the appreciation of nature for its own sake began with the French and Dutch painters (from whom the term derived). Their treatment of the landscape differed: the French tried to evoke the classical landscape of ancient Greece and Rome in a highly stylised and artificial manner; the Dutch tried to paint the surrounding fields, woods and plains in a more realistic way. As a genre, landscape grew increasing popular, and by the 19th Century had moved away from a classical rendition to a more realistic view of the natural world. Two of the greatest British landscape artists of that time were John Constable and JMW Turner, whose works can be seen in the Tate collection (www.tate.org.uk). There can be no doubt that the evolution of landscape painting played a decisive role in the development of Modernism, culminating in the work of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists . Since then its demise has often been predicted and with the rise of abstraction, landscape painting was thought to have degenerated into an amateur pursuit. However, landscape persisted in some form into high abstraction, and has been a recurrent a theme in most of the significant tendencies of the 20th Century. Now manifest in many media, landscape no longer addresses solely the depiction of topography, but encompasses issues of social, environmental and political concern.