End of 20th century art, 1900-2000

End of century art, 1900-2000 at Tate Britain.

Media, money and celebrity transformed the landscape of British art. Provocative young artists took central stage, while others contemplated cross-cultural identities.

After the political and social conflicts of the 1980s, Britain in the 1990s entered a period of apparently progressive optimism. Tony Blair's New Labout government increased funding for the arts and provided free admission to public museums. Young artists, musicians and designers enjoyed increased attention and celebrity. New Labour traded on this combination of art, music, celebrity and media in a moment known as 'Cool Britannia'.

A group of young artists made ambitious artworks and staged their own exhibitions in empty East London warehouses while still at art college. They were entrepreneurial and provocative, not waiting to be invited by established art galleries and museums. They became known as the Young British Artists (YBAs). Artists such as Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin gained celebrity and notoriety in equal measure as money began pouring into the scene. Their work often engaged with experiences of class and gender in Britain as well as existential feelings.

While the media fixated on the YBAs, artists as various as Mona Hatoum, Peter Doig and Chris Ofili developed practices that were more lyrical and reflective in sensibility. They reinvented painting, drawing or photography and experimented conceptually with less familiar materials and methods. They brought a multitude of cultural perspectives - transnational, post-colonial, queer - to Britain's increasingly globally connected art scene.

RB Kitaj, The Wedding, 1989-93, (oil on canvas)

Mona Hatoum, Present Tense, 1996, (soap and glass beads)

This olive oil soap is a traditional Palestinian product which has been produced since the 10th century in Nablus, a town north of Jerusalem. Hatoum drew on the soap blocks by pushing tiny red glass beads into their surface. The drawing depicts the map of the 1993 Oslo Peace Accord between Israel and Palestine, with the beads outlining the territories to be handed back to the Palestinian authority. Hatoum highlights the fleeting impermanence of official borders, in contrast to the lasting history of the Palestinian people.

Peter Doig, Echo Lake, 1998, (oil on canvas)

Echo Lake is one of several paintings by Peter Doig based on a still from the horror film Friday the 13th. The night-time scene is uneasy, illuminated by a soft band of colour. A US-style police car is parked askew, its headlamps on. The detective figure and his reflection cut into the shoreline of the lake. His hands cup his blurred eyes and mouth calling towards the centre of the lake, or to us looking at the painting. The title suggests that nothing responds but an echo.

looking closer

Lucian Freud, Leigh Bowery, 1991, (oil on canvas)

In this intimate portrait Bowery is naked and vulnerable, towards the end of his life. Bowery said of Freud: 'I love the psychological aspect of his work... His work is full of tension. Like me he is interested in the underbelly of things'.

Sutapa Biswas, To Touch Stone, 1989-90, (graphite on paper)

This image of the artist's sister is both formed and unformed, with some elements of the body existing only in outline. The ground she rests on is a flowing ribbon of words. The shift in techniques and the blank sheets of paper create a tension between emergence and absence. For Biswas, this work represents the desire both to 'sustain visibility/presence' and to be 'taken out of the race/gender/class binaries'. And through this, 'to recover a sense of being and a resistance to our erasure across time and space'.

Chris Ofili, No Woman, No Cry, 1998, (oil, acrylic, graphite, polyester resin, printed paper, glitter, map pins - elephant dung on canvas)

This is Ofili's tribute to the London teenager Stephen Lawrence, who was murdered in a racially motivated attack by a white gang in 1993. It depicts Lawrence's mother Doreen. In each of her tears is her son's face. In the initial murder investigation, the suspects were not convicted. Doreen Lawrence campaigned for a public inquiry. It concluded that the Metropolitan olice force was institutionally racist. Ofili saw the painting as a universal portrayal of grief. He titled it after the song by Bob Marley.

Damien Hirst, Away from the Flock, 1994, (glass stainless steel, perspex, acrylic paint, lamb + formaldehyde solution)

Sarah Lucas, Pauline Bunny, 1997, (wooden chair, vinyl seat, tights, kapok, metal wire, stockings and metal clamp)

'Bunny girl' waitresses worked in Playboy 'gentlemen's clubs'. Their uniform often featured stockings and rabbit ears.  Lucas' version undermines any sense of glamour, challenging the sexual objectification of women by taking it to absurd extremes. Pauline Bunny was originally exhibited with seven similar figurative sculptures, arranged around a snooker table. Their dangling limbs suggested powerless femininity, while the snooker table stood for masculine demonstrations of skill. Lucas titled the 1997 exhibition 'Bunny Gets Snookered'.

Gillian Wearing, I'm Desperate, 1992-93, (photograph, colour, chromogenic pring on paper)

Wearing has described her working method as 'editing life'. I'm Desperate is from a series in which she asked passers-by to write down their thoughts. She titled the series, Signs that Say What You Want Them to Say and Not Signs that Say What Someone Else Wants You to Say. She challenges social stereotypes. She said, 'A great deal of my work is about questioning handed-down truths'.

Rachel Whiteread, Torso, 1988, (plaster)

Torso was cast from the inside of a hot water bottle. It encapsulates interests that would define her career over the next 30 years. These include the process of casting forgotten space, an experimental use of materials and the emorional power of everyday objects.