Damien Hirst first came to public attention in London in 1988 when he conceived and curated "Freeze," an exhibition in a disused warehouse that showed his work and that of his friends and fellow students at Goldsmiths College. In the nearly quarter of a century since that pivotal show (which would come to define the Young British Artists), Hirst has become one of the most influential artists of his generation. His groundbreaking works include The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991), a shark in formaldehyde; Mother and Child Divided (1993) a four-part sculpture of a bisected cow and calf; and For the Love of God (2007), a human skull studded with 8,601 diamonds. In addition to his installations and sculptures, Hirst’s Spot paintings and Butterfly paintings have become universally recognized.

Jeff Koons plays with ideas of taste, pleasure, celebrity, and commerce. “I believe in advertisement and media completely,” he says. “My art and my personal life are based in it.” Working with seductive commercial materials (such as the high chromium stainless steel of his “Balloon Dog” sculptures or his vinyl “Inflatables”), shifts of scale, and an elaborate studio system involving many technicians, Koons turns banal objects into high art icons. His paintings and sculptures borrow widely from art-historical techniques and styles; although often seen as ironic or tongue-in-cheek, Koons insists his practice is earnest and optimistic. “I’ve always loved Surrealism and Dada and Pop, so I just follow my interests and focus on them,” he says. “When you do that, things become very metaphysical.” The “Banality” series that brought him fame in the 1980s included pseudo-Baroque sculptures of subjects like Michael Jackson with his pet ape, while his monumental topiaries, like the floral Puppy (1992), reference 17th-century French garden design.

Known for large-scale multimedia projects—often made in series over several years—Matthew Barney is among the most ambitious artists of the past two decades. His work is invested with layers of art-historical references, archetypal imagery, and historical re-enactment. His best-known work, The Cremaster Cycle (1994-2002), is an epic story told through five feature-length films. One of the suite’s recurrent themes uses the biological process of sexual maturation as a metaphor for artistic creation and development. Much of the action is structured in a way that is or alludes to choreography. “My interest in dance has to do with the basic drama of an object in space, interaction with gravity, and the potential for the object to fall over or to fail,” he has said. The work was executed in collaboration with dozens of other artists, including Richard Serra and Norman Mailer. He was awarded the Hugo Boss Prize in 1996 and the Europa 2000 Prize at the 1993 Venice Biennale.

From Hollywood films to scientific footage to classical literature, Douglas Gordon takes the seemingly familiar and twists it. Having begun his career as a performance artist, Gordon has produced a diverse body of works, which has grown to include video, sound photographic objects, and texts, often plays with viewers’ perceptions, memories and expectations. In his well known work 24 Hour Psycho (1993), he slows down Alfred Hitchcock's legendary 1960 film Psycho into a full day's duration, drawing out the horror until it has ceased to be suspenseful. As Gordon himself has said, “I am the one who provides the board, the pieces and the dice, but you are the one who has to play.” Gordon won a Hugo Boss Prize in 1998.