Sensation - Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection
September 30, 1998 - January 17, 1999
Hamburger Bahnhof - National Gallery of the Present

A project of the Royal Academy of Arts, “Sensation” was successfully shown in London a few months ago and was seen by more than 350,000 visitors. The exhibition won for Berlin shows a selection of 110 works from the Saatchi collection. The 42 young British artists include Damien Hirst, Sarah Lucas, Fiona Rae, Gary Hume, Richard Billingham, Jake & Dinos Chapman and Rachel Whiteread.

In the 1980s, Charles Saatchi dedicated himself to young British art, which he was able to bring together in an astonishingly rich and uniquely dense collection. In 1985 he founded his own private museum in a former factory in London: the Saatchi Gallery. With commitment and curiosity, his sense of extremes and tolerance for the juxtaposition of artistic ideas, he became the most important patron of contemporary British art.

In the past ten years, there has been no artistic movement that, in its individual commitment to realism, in its closeness to the myths of everyday life or contemporary, socially critical questions, has formulated such unusually radical, challenging, but seriously new artistic answers as this generation of British artists.

Most of the artists represented in the exhibition have now rightly received worldwide attention. They raise questions that reflect contemporary issues in the age of the invention of virtual worlds of experience and some doubtfully contradictory scientific visions. Obsessions and exhaustions of our society, its real and apparent progress, manifest themselves in a wide variety of metaphors and forms of expression. Their realism can be shocking. “Sensation” is an attempt to define this generation and its language.