Soft Pay-Telephone by Claes Oldenburg

Many of Ann Hamilton’s works involve amassing identical or similar objects. Between taxonomy and communion, 1990 – comprising 14,000 human and animal teeth – explores the interconnectedness between human and animal worlds.

Known to avoid interviews by sending a proxy, and escaping his own exhibition openings by stealth, Maurizio Cattelan and his work are complex characters to get to know.

This alluring pile of individually cellophane-wrapped candy is known as Untitled (Public Opinion), 1991. Felix Gonzalez-Torres first executed the work in the USA in 1991 as a protest against the first Gulf War.

These photo-realistic paintings by Jeff Koons overwhelm the viewer, ensuring, like the advertising world, that there is little time to recognise one’s desires before another product is thrust upon us.

Painter Nigel Cooke and photographer Elger Esser play with our comprehension of their work when viewed from near and far, emphasising the act of reflection, rather than the recognition of location.

The relationship between truth and fiction is played out in this selection of works from Sarah Anne Johnson’s series Tree Planting, 2003-2005, while Gregory Crewdson’s work Untitled (family dinner), 2001-2002, centres on uncanny human behaviour.

Thomas Demand toys with our faith in photographs and the historical events that we remember through them. In Archive, 1995, he reconstructs the personal inventory of Nazi propagandist and filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl.

Masculinity, penetration, escape, ego, transcendence and metamorphoses are just some of the concepts investigated in Matthew Barney’s Cremaster Cycle film series.

The electric chair, then a common device for capital punishment in America, first featured in Warhol’s art in 1963 as part of his Death and Disaster series.

While many Pop artists maintained the manufactured identity of the objects they worked with, Claes Oldenburg casually undermined them as can be seen in his work Soft Pay-Telephone, 1963.