Nearly 40 years ago, a group of second-year Goldsmiths fine-art students looked at the artistic landscape and saw no place for their renegade sensibilities. So they took fate into their own hands and made a show in an abandoned Port Authority building in Docklands.
This DIY exhibition, Freeze, coordinated by Damien Hirst, catapulted the talents of a group of twentysomethings into the public eye. They would go on to be Turner Prize nominees and winners. Gary Hume, Angela Bulloch, Anya Gallaccio, Ian Davenport and Sarah Lucas, and with others — Tracey Emin, Gillian Wearing, Steve McQueen, Rachel Whiteread, Chris Ofili — the Young British Artists, or YBAs, as they were called by their Goldsmiths tutor, Michael Craig-Martin, helped shape the transformation of London through the 1990s.
