The first definitive survey of work by the YBAs, or Young British Artists, who had emerged in the late 1980s, it opened at London’s Royal Academy, astonishing the international art world with its vitality and inventiveness. Showcasing the collection of the prodigious patron of contemporary art, Charles Saatchi, Sensation featured the work of 42 of the most exciting British artists of recent times. Many of them – such as Rachel Whiteread, Jake & Dinos Chapman and Sam Taylor-Wood – are now internationally acclaimed.

Travelling to Berlin and New York, Sensation attracted widespread media coverage, generating controversy and debate over a series of now-iconic works, including Damien Hirst’s The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, a shark pickled in formaldehyde, and Tracey Emin’s tent, Everyone I Have Ever Slept with 1963–1995, since destroyed in the infamous Momart fire of 2004.