Hamad Masood Butt (9 January 1962 – 25 September 1994) was a British artist of Pakistani heritage who made a series of pioneering works in the early 1990s which sought to bring art into conversation with science, specifically in critical response to the AIDS crisis.
[3] There he was part of a lively cohort of art students including Damien Hirst, Angela Bulloch, Mat Collishaw, Angus Fairhurst, Michael Landy, Gillian Wearing and Simon Patterson, many of whom would become known as the Young British Artists (Butt was not affiliated).
The installation included a circle of glass books (now part of the Tate Collection), a series of works on paper, an animated video, and a vitrine containing live flies.
[3] In 1992 Butt showed Familiars, a tripartite installation of dangerous-looking sculptures constructed of glass and steel in precarious setups that appear to threaten to release toxic matter into the immediate environment.
Art critic Stuart Morgan wrote in a review in Frieze that, on encountering Butt's Substance Sublimation Unit (1992), "Watching iodine crystals inside the rungs of a hollow glass ladder heat and turn into vapour stresses the themes of metamorphosis, disguise or sheer instability, and visitors become more and more uneasy as they sense comparisons between their own existence and that of these volatile substances.