Stuckism

Stuckism is an international art movement founded in London in 1999 by painters Billy Childish and Charles Thomson, its deliberately self-deprecating name taken from an insult Tracey Emin, Childish's former partner, had aimed at his work, telling him it was stuck, stuck, stuck. Positioned explicitly against the conceptual and installation-based Young British Artists then dominant in the London art world, particularly the Turner Prize and the Saatchi-backed Britart scene, the group issued manifestos championing figurative painting as a sincere, skill-based practice and denouncing conceptual art as a fashionable dead end reliant on shock and irony rather than craft. Stuckist groups formed in cities across Britain and internationally through the 2000s, holding regular counter-exhibitions timed to coincide with the Turner Prize, and while never achieving the market prominence of the artists it opposed, the movement remains active as an organized, self-consciously polemical defense of representational painting.