Image: Ben Brown Fine Arts, London
Ben Brown Fine Arts will stage ‘Surface Tension: British Painting in the 1990s’ in London from 18 September to 30 October 2026. The forthcoming exhibition brings together Hurvin Anderson, Cecily Brown, Glenn Brown, Peter Doig, Gary Hume and Chris Ofili, and opens with a private view on 17 September.
The show offers an account of painters working during the decade when, in its own framing, the Young British Artists dominated British art-world attention. It points to the tabloid headlines and museum surveys surrounding the readymades and installations of Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, Rachel Whiteread, Sarah Lucas and their peers, while turning to painters who continued to work under that cultural pressure.
Rather than presenting the six artists as a single school, ‘Surface Tension’ identifies them as distinct voices shaped by their age. Its stated point of connection is a shared preoccupation with surface, gesture and the physical act of painting. The exhibition argues that considering the group together reveals the pressures—described as a possible “siege mentality”—that strengthened their work, and contests reports of painting’s death.
Cecily Brown recalls the period in the exhibition text: “I was still a student in London … feeling the ignominy of being a figurative painter the year after Freeze. If one was painting then it was assumed that it was out of ignorance or from a stubborn refusal to notice that the world had changed.”
