Representing the diversity of contemporary art through a variety of media, here are the eight top-selling women in the YBA (Young British Artists), the group of visual artists who began exhibiting collectively in London in 1988.
8. Gillian Wearing
The Turner Prize-winning artist Gillian Wearing is known for her imaginative and conceptual photography, particularly her highly influential 1992-93 series ‘Signs that Say What You Want Them To Say and Not Signs that Say What Someone Else Wants You To Say’. Wearing asked strangers to write a sentence of what they were thinking then photographed them holding it, in a sort of confessional piece/street photography hybrid. In her self-portraits, she employs masks, prosthetics, and photoshop to alter her appearance à la Cindy Sherman, resulting in pieces that are both captivating and unsettling. A first edition C-print of her 2000 Self-Portrait sold at Christie’s for £35,000 ($45,395) in 2016, setting the highest price achieved by the artist to date.
Related: The Female Look: 11 Women who Changed Photography
7. Angela Bulloch
A true Renaissance woman, Angela Bulloch works with video, installation, sculpture and painting with equal ease. She often creates interactive exhibits melding video, sound and light that explore human behaviour through the viewers’ willing participation and psychological response. Her best-known works are her ‘pixel boxes’, cubes containing fluorescent tubes that can be programmed to change color either in conjunction or separately. The pixel box set Copper 4 from George Michael’s collection sold at Christie’s for £37,500 ($49,725) in early 2019 – more than twice its original estimate. Although Bulloch’s work is still mainly shown in galleries, this sale continued the trend of her light pieces going far above their estimates at auction.
6. Fiona Rae
Born in Hong Kong and raised in England, Fiona Rae’s bright and hypnotic abstract paintings have captured attention all over the world. Incorporating lettering and graphics with pop imagery and naturalistic swirls, her pieces contains enough that’s recognizable as to seem familiar while also pioneering a style of abstraction that’s laden with post-digital visual conventions. Her Figure 1i is done in an uncharacteristic greyscale that nevertheless retains the looping, energetic brushstrokes that she is known for. Selling for £56,250 ($84,713) at Christie’s in 2015, the painting set a personal price record that has yet to be beaten.
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5. Tacita Dean
Looking to the past for the best way to present her conceptual art, Tacita Dean worked primarily with 16 mm film to create short videos, a format that largely disappeared when the last Kodak plant producing the film shut in 2006. Moving on to other media, Dean still retains cinematographic qualities in her works. Her black-and-white photographs and drawings appear almost as film stills, and her appreciation for analogue forms is clear. Dean’s 2000 Wake set a record for the artist, selling for £133,250 ($215,199) in 2012. The piece depicts the ocean in white chalk on blackboard, outlined with a hazy depth that captures the turbulent movement of the water.
4. Sarah Lucas
Related: The 15 Most Expensive Female Artists
Scandalizing the art world for nearly 30 years, Sarah Lucas’ tongue-in-cheek plaster casts, suggestive assemblages and self-portraits have made her popular both in the UK and across the world. Her 1992 work Two Fried Eggs and a Kebab, made of fresh food arranged to form male genitalia, caught the eye of Charles Saatchi, who had first noticed her work at the famed Freeze exhibition organized by Damien Hirst. Lucas’ assemblage Ace in the Hole, made of stocking ‘bunnies’ arranged around a table, sold at Sotheby’s New York for $905,000 in 2014 and her popularity isn’t dying down. She represented Britain at the Venice Biennale in 2015, and in 2018 the New Museum in New York and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles presented the first American survey of her work.
3. Rachel Whiteread
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Transforming humble industrial materials into high art, Rachel Whiteread uses plaster, concrete, resin, rubber, and metal to take casts of everyday objects and present them in a new way. She was the first woman to win the Turner Prize in 1993 for her House, and in 1995 exhibited in Charles Saatchi’s traveling Sensation with Untitled (Twenty-five Spaces), which consisted of colorful cast resin moulds of the space beneath chairs. A pared-down version sold at Christie’s in 2014 for £578,500 ($937,749), setting a record for the artist. Whiteread has no sign of slowing down, having since created Untitled Monument for the fourth plinth in London’s Trafalgar Square, been awarded a damehood by the Queen, and participating in a series of solo shows around the world.
2. Tracey Emin
Another multimedia mastermind is Tracey Emin. Utilizing everything from paint and video to needlework and sculpture, Emin’s work is deeply personal and confessional in a way that often draws comparison to the art of Louise Bourgeois. Often working with Sarah Lucas, Emin exemplifies the feminist tenant that the ‘personal is political’, facing childhood trauma and issues of gender and sexuality head-on and using them as inspiration. These themes clearly resonate with viewers, and her 1998 assemblage My Bed fetched a staggering £2,546,500 ($4.3 million) at Christie’s in 2014. Featuring Emin’s unmade bed surrounded by items such as empty liquor bottles, a stuffed animal, condoms, and cigarette butts, it explores the bed as a place of birth, sex, and death, as well as depicting a physical manifestation of heartbreak.
1. Jenny Saville
In 2018, the sale of Jenny Saville’s Propped for £9,537,250 ($12.4 million) at Sotheby’s catapulted the artist to the top of the auction records and gave her the title of the world’s most expensive living female artist. Born in Cambridge, Saville became a favorite of Charles Saatchi and quickly made a name for herself in the YBA movement with her nude paintings. Her portraits feature subjects often denied a place in the artistic canon: the obese, the dying and the bodies that do not otherwise fit the narrow Western standards of beauty. Her works are intimate and sensitive, engaging and timeless enough that they are often featured alongside pieces by Egon Schiele and Francis Bacon.
Related: Jenny Saville: The Art of the Sculpted Nude on Canvas
Although no women have yet made it onto the list of most expensive living artists, it is clear that talent abounds among female contemporary artists. The market for their works is growing quickly, and the days of being undervalued at auction may soon be over. For now, however, buying pieces by female YBAs may be an affordable way to begin or round out a first-class contemporary art collection.
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Article by Madeleine Whalen
