There were a lot of important and influential art movements that started and occurred during the 1980s. One which stood out to me a lot was Brit-Art. This consisted of a lot of artists working specifically in the United Kingdom, their outlandish and outstanding art pieces getting a large amount of media coverage at the time due to the different style, inspired by very abstract styles such as Dadaism, and they dominated the British art scene as a whole in the 1980s and 1990s. The main example of this was art by the controversial Damien Hirst, creator of pieces such as The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, which showed a tiger shark completely contained in formaldehyde in a vitrine.

The art style that I decided to look at in the end was neo-expressionism. At the time, the 1970s was mostly dominated by art movements such as minimalism and conceptualism, and while they were important were seen as very intellectual or purist, not allowing for a large degree of difference in art. This frustrated a lot of artists at the time and through that fire, neo-expressionism was born. This art movement was a complete revival of everything involving some form of abstract expression or emotion in their work, working in a lot of art styles which modern artists tried to discredit with styles such as minimalism which worked directly against art pieces having a large amount of meaning. Historical themes and inspiration, high emotion, taking after themes as early as the renaissance in their art.

The artist that I looked at for this time was Anselm Kiefer. Anselm was a German painter and sculptor who used a wide range of real mediums in his art, such as straw and ash in order for him to be able to more accurately represent art styles. A lot of his work was extremely controversial due to the subject matter of it all. As he was born on the latter end of Nazi rule in Germany, a lot of his work was influenced greatly by the lasting effects that their rule had over Germany, and Europe as a whole, at the time, primarily including the ways that their instigation of war in 1939 and the mistreatment of non-Aryan minorities, mainly the Jewish communities. His culture has an extremely dark past, and yet he looks back at it without hesitation to realise the vast potential that it had to work off in artistry and spreading the important message that was needed.