NEWSPEAK:BRITISH ART NOW

Part One at The Saatchi Gallery, 30 May – 17 October 2010
Part Two at The Saatchi Gallery, 27 October – 30 Apr 2011
At The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg, Russia, 25 October 2009 – 17 January 2010
At The Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 30 July – 23 October 2011

Over a decade after Sensation and the advent of the YBAs, this new generation of artists are making work that collectively offers an arresting insight into the future of contemporary art in Britain. In Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, Newspeak is “the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year”; this exhibition turns that Orwellian vision on its head, showing that the range of visual languages being exploited and invented by these artists is in fact expanding and multiplying. Through sculpture, painting, photography and installation, they explore issues such as class, consumerism and the phenomenon of instant success culture, often with a distinctly British dry wit.

A selection of works from the exhibition were shown at The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg in October 2009, including Eugenie Scrase’s Truncated Trunk, chosen from the BBC2 series School of Saatchi, which aired last autumn.