Charles Atlas, Bodymap, Leigh Bowery, Victor Burgin, Marc Camille Chaimowicz, Michael Clark, Duvet Brothers, Peter Doig, Gorilla Tapes, Brian Eno, Cerith Wyn Evans, Gilbert and George, Richard Hamilton, Derek Jarman, Isaac Julien, Tina Keane, Sandra Lahire, Linder, Stuart Marshall & Neil Bartlett, John Maybury, Neo-Naturists, Julian Opie, Jon Savage, Peter Saville, Mark E. Smith, Wolfgang Tillmans, Trojan, Stephen Willats

The exhibition “The Secret Public. The Last Days of the British Underground 1978–1988.” is internationally the first attempt to critically re-evaluate Britain’s recent past, while also presenting the lasting impact that artists and cultural producers of this time have on the cultural and political fabric of Britain today.

Disquieting, playful and intensely urban, at times aggressively nihilistic or steeped in confrontational sexuality, a dark flowering of creativity occurred in the UK between 1978 and 1988 which was as much an extension of subcultural lifestyle as it was a consequence of art making in the traditional sense.

Occurring at a time of lowering political, economic and social change, this was a flourishing of creativity that seemed to take shape in a covert form outside the institutional canon of the time - creating its own underground network of activities, events, economies and celebrities.

As an exhibition, The Secret Public examines an art and creativity which was deeply concerned with gender, sexuality and the performative self - the body as a performance and spectacle. In this it also engaged with fashion, dance, performance, film and music, as well as what was, in the early 1980s, the emerging form and video art. As such it surveys perhaps the last period in British culture before the rise of the consumer environment and the flattening of sub-cultural manifestations and creative industries into a single, pasteurised range of commodified styles.