Damien Hirst , Ian Jeffrey

A first edition catalog of an important exhibition by a group of student artists at Goldsmiths College, later identified as the Young British Artists, organized and curated by provocateur Damien Hirst.

• Damien Hirst (English).
• Ian Jeffrey (English).
• Photography by Edward Woodman, with the exception of Sovereign and Untitled.
• London: The Artists and Ian Jeffrey, 1988.
• Unpaginated.
• Illustrated with color and black and white plates.
• Features artists Steven Adamson, Angela Bulloch, Mat Collishaw, Ian Davenport, Angus Fairhurst, Anya Gallaccio, Gary Hume, Michael Landy, Abigail Lane, Sarah Lucas, Lala Meredith-Vula, Stephen Park, Richard Patterson, Simon Patterson and Fiona Rae.
• Presented in original printed bronze wrappers.

In his essay "Platonic Tropics," Ian Jeffrey (then head of art history at Goldsmiths) circles and spins around the idea of a generational "collective imagination," what had become of it, and what it had come to in 1988: "Perhaps '88 works and makes in terms of difference, that it begins from an idea of polarity and of the complementary, and works towards totalization." Perhaps. Coherent or not, Freeze was important for what it was, what it did and what it represented. It was a DIY show organized outside the gallery system in a disused Port Authority building by largely middle-class art students with impressive corporate sponsorship—the retroactively mythic origin point of a movement and a highly successful machine for turning seeming outsiders into art world insiders.