Archives: Exhibitions

Saatchi Gallery is pleased to present KNOWN UNKNOWNS, a major new exhibition featuring the work of 17 contemporary artists.

Known Unknowns showcases an international selection of artists, born between 1966 and 1990, from the Saatchi Gallery’s collection. The title refers to the artists’ status in the mainstream art world – whilst the group is largely unknown, their respective practices are greatly admired by their artistic peers and seen as breaking new ground.

The exhibition features a diverse range of art forms including painting, sculpture, video and mixed media, with a particular focus on the craft of art-making. The works deal with a myriad of themes that relate to the visual conditions of contemporary life, such as the exponential flow of images, the representation of the body in the Internet age, and the ethics of viewing versus voyeurism.

These artists are not afraid to explore new media in thought-provoking ways, and each pursues a highly individualised practice. They are a seemingly disparate group, yet together reflect the diversity and breadth of contemporary art in a globalised and increasingly digital age.

While Known Unknowns does not offer an obvious unifying theme or ideological point of view, it presents its audience with a group of artists that are worthy of wider exposure.
Tom Anholt |Sara Barker | Alida Cervantes |Francesca DiMattio |Theo Ellison | Maria Farrar | Stefanie Heinze | Chris Hood | Rannva Kunoy | Jill McKnight | Stuart Middleton | Mona Osman |
Kirstine Roepstorff |
Ben Schumacher |
Tamuna Sirbiladze |
Isobel Smith |
Bedwyr Williams |
Saskia Olde Wolbers|

Oneness Wholeness draws on thousands of years of Iranian culture, weaving ancient Persian motifs, patterns and landscapes into large-scale mixed media paintings, to explore Iranian identity in the 21st century. Descended from the ancient nomadic Bakhtiari tribe, Sassan’s large scale paintings recall the Zagros Mountains in South West Iran that are still home to the tribe, amongst other subjects. The Oneness Wholeness series features new, previously unseen work that Sassan has been developing for the last few years.

Through exploring his Persian heritage and his dedicated meditative practices, Sassan has used his art as cathartic release, leading him to explore ideas around existentialism, human compassion and wellbeing.

Oneness Wholeness will be Sassan Behnam-Bakhtiar’s first UK exhibition since The Real Me, his debut in London in 2014.

About Sassan Behnam-Bakhtiar


Sassan is also committed to supporting other emerging artistic talent from Iran and showcasing the rich cultural legacy of one of the world’s oldest cultures. In 2015 he set up the Fondation Behnam-Bakhtiar in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, where he provides emerging, mid-career and established Iranian artists a platform to showcase their work to the international art market.

Currently based in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, Sassan was born during the middle of the Iran-Iraq war in the Parisian suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine in 1984. Sassan lived in Paris for most of his childhood, spending much of his spare time visiting the city’s many art galleries, before moving to Tehran at the age of ten. Sassan began making work in 2009 and has since exhibited internationally. He lives with his wife in Saint-Jean-Cap- Ferrat, Cote d’Azur, where they have set up an art gallery in the neighbouring principality of Monaco, in Monte-Carlo, that exhibits Iranian artists alongside established international artists.

https://www.sassanbehnambakhtiar.com/

About Nina Moaddel


Nina Moaddel is an Iranian born curator and advisor based in London. She has curated exhibitions in Europe and Asia with a focus on Iranian artists, including the Tehran Pavilion at the 9th Shanghai Biennale. Her advisory work relates to placing Iranian and Western artworks in reputable private collections as well as foundations and museums internationally including Museum of Everything, Musée d’Art Classique de Mougins and a/political foundation. She has also collaborated with institutions worldwide including Kunsthal Rotterdam, Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, Institute of Contemporary Arts London, Royal Academy of Arts and Saatchi Gallery.

<"[By 1960], I decided I didn't want to express other artists' ideas any longer. I wanted to paint what was in front of me." Philip Pearlstein, Studio International, 2016

SALON, in collaboration with Betty Cuningham Gallery, New York, is delighted to announce its fourth exhibition, Paintings 1990 – 2017, a presentation of works by the revered American artist, Philip Pearlstein.

Pearlstein, now 93, has had an active career in the US and abroad since the mid-1950s. He first studied painting at the Carnegie Institute of Technology where he met Andy Warhol. Upon graduation, Warhol and Pearlstein moved to New York together to seek work in commercial design and pursue their own fine art careers. Pearlstein worked in an abstract expressionist style in the 1950s, before shifting to realism. This show, which is comprised of eight large-scale works in oil, is a celebration of his depiction of the human nude, a subject that has preoccupied Pearlstein since 1960 – as he says, ‘it is a shape that is always changing.’ In the 1980s, Pearlstein began to surround his sitter with objects from his personal collection to further engage the viewer and challenge himself. This exhibition highlights the strategies he employs in creating a complexity in his paintings that continues today.

Models and Blimp (1991), with its Michelin man, decoy swan and antique weathervane, is illustrative of Pearlstein’s mature work. While the props around the two female models intrigue, they are not there to create meaning or narrative. For Pearlstein, painting is abstract, it is just painting: his approach to living, human flesh is the same as to inanimate objects.

In this work, as with others, Pearlstein chooses a point of view that creates the most challenging composition for him to paint, and for the beholder to view. The unsettling effect of the skewed, oblique angles and perspectival compression is further reinforced by the truncation of the head and legs of the model in the foreground.

Masterful and powerful, every painting featured in the show goes against the conventions of portraiture – often emotive and introspective. Pearlstein’s works maintain a sense of complete detachment, which is both alluring and disconcerting.

Says Senior Director Saatchi Gallery, Philippa Adams: ‘Philip Pearlstein’s approach to the nude is unflinching – as a realist, he paints what he sees. However, the introduction of random objects from his studio brings a sense of ambiguity. Indisputably one of America’s greatest artists, SALON is honoured to be working with Pearlstein, and with Betty Cuningham, to bring this exhibition together.’

About the Artist

Philip Pearlstein was born in Pittsburgh, PA in 1924. He received a BFA from Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1949 and an MA from NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts in 1955. That same year he had his first solo show at Tanager Gallery. Among Pearlstein’s honours are a National Endowment for the Arts grant, 1968; a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, 1969; and election to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, 1982, for which he served as President from 2003 – 2006; and recently the Icon Award in the Arts from the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, CT. Honorary Doctorates received from: Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, 1983; Brooklyn College, Brooklyn; College of Art & Design, Detroit; New York Academy of Arts, New York; and Lyme Academy College of Fine Arts, Old Lyme. Currently, he lives and works in New York City.

Pearlstein’s work can be seen in a host of prestigious collections in the United States, most notably: The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland; de Young Museum, San Francisco; Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Morgan Library and Museum, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington DC; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia; Portland Museum of Art, Portland; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

About Betty Cuningham Gallery

Betty Cuningham has by her own admission reinvented her gallery several times. In 1972, she opened her first gallery on Prince Street in the heart of Soho, just above the well-known bar, Fanelli’s, where she showed John Walker, Ross Bleckner, Ray Parker, David Diao among others. In 1982, Mike Fanelli died and Betty moved uptown to join Hirschl & Adler Modern where she first began working with Philip Pearlstein. This was the beginning of their 36-year business partnership. The pair moved twice: in 1998 to the Robert Miller Gallery and in 2004 to her re-opened Betty Cuningham Gallery. Currently she represents (in addition to Philip Pearlstein) Rackstraw Downes, William Bailey, the Estates of Christopher Wilmarth, Andrew Forge, and Jake Berthot and Bill Traylor from the Charles E. and Eugenia C. Shannon Trust. After 10 years in Chelsea, the gallery relocated to Manhattan’s Lower East Side (only a few blocks away from where she first opened).

[email protected] | www.bettycuninghamgallery.com

About SALON at Saatchi Gallery

SALON, Saatchi Gallery’s new project space has been created to present the work of leading international artists who have had limited exposure in the UK. Located in its own self-contained space at the Saatchi Gallery, this new venture will collaborate with galleries and artists’ estates in selling exhibitions, and is directed by Philippa Adams, Senior Director, Saatchi Gallery.

Iconoclasts explored the experimental and often transformational practices of a small group of groundbreaking artists, inviting us to engage anew with what modern day iconoclasm might be.

By using a myriad of unusual image-making practices – from branding imagery onto human skin to sculpting curving structures out of crow feathers – these artists are breaking the mould, ushering in a new age of artistic defiance through their resistance of typical artistic processes and their personal interpretations of cultural mores.

“I think I am a realist, because I make what I see. It’s only the problem of seeing it. If you can imagine a thing, then you can make it and ‘tout de suite’ you’re a realist (…). The universe is real, but you can’t see it. You have to imagine it. Once you imagine it, you can be realistic about producing it.”
-Alexander Calder (1898 – 1976)
‘Artists voice, 1962’

SALON, in collaboration with Omer Tiroche Gallery, is pleased to announce its third exhibition, Calder on Paper: 1960 – 1976, a presentation of gouaches on paper by the American artist Alexander Calder, opening 27 September, 2017.

Despite being most widely celebrated for his mobiles (also known as ‘drawings in space’), Calder (1889 – 1976) began his artistic career as a painter, developing his gouache technique in the 1930s while living in Paris. He preferred working with gouache over oil paint and watercolour because it dries more quickly, and for the medium’s opacity of colour. The works exhibited at SALON were made between 1960 and 1976.

Alongside this presentation, Omer Tiroche Gallery, Mayfair, London, will show a collection of earlier works on paper by the artist dating from 1939 to 1959 (2 October until 8 December, 2017). Exhibiting work from two separate periods of Calder’s career serves to create a comprehensive retrospective of his gouaches. It also ensures that a greater number of works will be on display across the two spaces – both familiar and unfamiliar to the viewer – which in turn greater elucidates Calder’s contribution to the development of modern art.

Calder’s gouaches were first exhibited at Kootz Gallery in New York in 1945, and were well received by critics, who called him ‘a possible rival to the likes of Klee and Miro.’ Calder maintained a sense of playfulness and humour throughout his career, often creating new forms and works by rearranging his extant visual vocabulary.

Taking certain aspects from his mobiles, such as ideas of kinetics and angularity, the works in gouache displayed at both galleries illuminate Calder’s celebration of nature. In particular, the exhibition of later works at SALON gives a glimpse of Calder’s personal observations and impressions of the solar system, the animal world, primitive civilisations and basic geometric figures such as spirals, circles and triangles.

From the late 1950s onwards, Calder created his most notable works on paper. His late-career focus on simplicity and immediacy and purity of colour, line and form firmly establish the gouaches as one of the most accessible bodies of works of the 20th century.

Says Senior Director, Saatchi Gallery, Philippa Adams: ‘We are delighted to be working with Omer Tiroche Gallery for SALON’s third presentation. Many know Alexander Calder is, of course, best known for his sculptural works, and it is fascinating to witness how these two elements of his practice fed off one another.’

About Alexander Calder (b. Philadelphia, United States, 1898)

American artist Alexander Calder, known as ‘’Sandy’’ to his wide circle of friends, was born in Philadelphia in 1898. He was born into a family of artists – his father and grandfather were famous sculptors and his mother was a painter. Art was part of Calder’s everyday life and he had his own studio/workshop from a young age. Calder studied at the Stevens Institute of Technology and Students League. His studies in engineering and physics and passion for kinetics and astronomy shaped his artistic career, which was in constant evolution with a complex weave of subjects and styles. Like the artists Joan Miro and Piet Mondrian from whom he took inspiration, Calder confronted conventional art styles to free painting and sculpture from their traditional constraints.

About Omer Tiroche Gallery

Omer Tiroche Gallery is located in Mayfair, London, and works with internationally established artists: Calder, Haring, Basquiat, Picasso, Warhol and more. Since opening its permanent exhibition space in February 2015, Omer Tiroche Gallery has held historical solo exhibitions and shows with living artists. In addition to its London space, Omer Tiroche Gallery also run a non-profit gallery in Jaffa, Israel, to provide an exhibition platform for emerging artists, both Israeli and international. Calder on Paper: 1939-1959 will be on view in Mayfair from 2 October until 8 December, 2017 . 21 CONDUIT STREET | LONDON | W1S 2XP

About SALON at Saatchi Gallery

SALON, Saatchi Gallery’s new project space has been created to present the work of leading international artists who have had limited exposure in the UK. Located in its own self-contained space at the Saatchi Gallery, this new venture will collaborate with galleries and artists’ estates in selling exhibitions, and is directed by Philippa Adams, Senior Director, Saatchi Gallery. Calder on Paper: 1960-1976 will be on view at SALON from 27 September until 8 December, 2017. [email protected]

Art Riot: Post-Soviet Actionism is dedicated to Russian protest art over the past 25 years. It will take place in the year of the 100th anniversary of Russia’s October Revolution and although the exhibition will not have any direct links to this historical event, many of the issues that artists face in post-communist Russia are comparable to those in 1917. These include, but are by no means limited to, problems of individual freedom in the face of both political ideology and also religion. The exhibition will feature such performance artists as Oleg Kulik, Pussy Riot, Pyotr Pavlensky, Blue Noses and some others and display various genres and types of protest art from posters and slogans to video art, staged photography and performances.

Oleg Kulik ranks among the most interesting and controversial Russian artists. He has managed to attract the attention of art critics and exhibition curators by his performance shows, characterised by “strong expression” where he himself assumes a role of “artist-animal”. He would be a dog, a bird, a fish, a bull. The artist thus simplifies his performance language to the basic emotional vocabulary of an animal.

Pussy Riot is a Russian feminist protest punk rock group founded in 2011. The group staged unauthorised performances in unusual public places, such as the Red Square or the Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior which were made into music videos distributed via social media networks. The collective’s lyrical themes included feminism, LGBT rights, and opposition to the oppressive policy of the Russian President Vladimir Putin. In 2012 two of the group members, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina, were arrested and sentenced to two years’ imprisonment.

Pyotr Pavlensky practises actionism, an art form with a rich history in Russia. He calls his particular brand of actionism “political art”. Since emerging in the public eye in 2012, Pavlensky has produced a string of profound performances. Leading up to “Threat”, he sewed his mouth shut; rolled naked in barbed wire (“Carcass”); sat naked on Red Square and nailed his scrotum to the cobblestones as a metaphor for the “apathy, political indifference and fatalism” of modern Russian society (“Fixation”); set the doors of the Russian Security Services (FSB) headquarters on fire “The Burning Doors of Lybyanka” .

The exhibition curated by Marat Guelman is the fourth project organised by the Tsukanov Family Foundation in partnership with Saatchi Gallery. The latest blockbuster shows of this cooperation were “Breaking the Ice: Moscow Art, 1960-80s” (2012-2013), “Post-Pop: East Meets West” (2014-2015) and “Revelations” (2016).”

Presented by Vigo Gallery

The Dutch-born Belgian artist, Bram Bogart, (1921 – 2012) is an artist associated with bold, thickly physical colour and form. His legacy is the culmination over seven decades of the foundational modernist impulse to stage and progress the stuff of paint. ‘Witte de Witte’ comprises a group of rare monochrome or near monochrome works made between 1952 and 2006 which illustrate his achievement through relative context without the seduction of colour, allowing his contribution to the story of modernism to be witnessed in starker, more elemental and more overtly physical terms.

The exhibition illustrates Bogart’s shift in the fifties and sixties into pure abstraction and his progressive inquiry into and testing of the material surface of painting. This restriction of colour he said, ‘evoked a kind of tranquility in me’ despite constantly striving for ‘the field of tension to be retained’.

The works point us in the direction of other in the artist’s personal pantheon, to the asceticism and severities of Piet Mondrian or the brooding sea and landscapes of Flemish expressionist Constant Permeke. But it is not all asceticism and severity. Even here in these reductive circumstances – even with red, blue, green and yellow banished – we may still feel how much Bogart shared with his hero Van Gogh an open attitude to life and to sensation, a directness, a just-controlled turbulence and an appealing gaucheness. Like Fontana, who instigated swaps of work, he challenged the sculptural qualities of the void and has left a vital and important contribution to the history of art.

LIBYA: A HUMAN MARKETPLACE


Fondation Carmignac is pleased to announce the exhibition of the 7th Laureate of the Carmignac Photojournalism Award, the Mexican photographer Narciso Contreras, at the Saatchi Gallery, London, from 16 May to 9 July 2017.



This report narrates the thoughts and observations of the photojournalist as he has travelled through the complex tribal society of post-Gaddafi Libya from February to June 2016, photographing the brutal reality of human trafficking. Contreras lays bare an unfolding humanitarian crisis in which illegal migrants, refugees and asylum seekers are at the mercy of militias who exploit them for financial gain. Held in detention centres for illegal migrants, they are subjected to inhumane conditions including overcrowding, lack of sanitation and vicious beatings. Throughout this report, Contreras weaves a compelling narrative to show how, instead of being a place of transit for migrants on their way to Europe, Libya has actually become a trafficking market where people are bought and sold on a daily basis.



In 2009, Fondation Carmignac established the Carmignac Photojournalism Award with the aim of funding and promoting an investigative photo report on human rights violations each year. The winner receives a €50,000 grant to produce an in-depth, in-the-field photo essay. After it has been completed, the Fondation provides further support, financing a monograph on the investigation and working with the photographer to develop and stage an international touring exhibition that begins in Paris.



Four photos from the essay are subsequently included in the Carmignac Collection.



Each year, at the end of the five-month photo reportage in the selected area, the work of the Carmignac Photojournalism Award Laureate is used to produce both a major exhibition in Paris and London, and the publication of a monograph. After taking place at the Hotel de l’Industrie, in the heart of the Saint-Germain district in Paris and in Palazzo Relae in Milano, the exhibition of 32 photographs by Narciso Contreras will be displayed from 16 May to 16 June 2017 at London’s Saatchi Gallery, which has been hosting the Carmignac Photojournalism Award for the third consecutive year.

Lévy Gorvy is pleased to announce an exhibition of paintings by Tsuyoshi Maekawa, to be held in collaboration with Saatchi Gallery. It will be the inaugural presentation at Saatchi Gallery’s new project space, SALON, launching on 24 February 2017.

The exhibition will include a selection of paintings by the artist from the 1950s and ’60s, conveying both his unique sensibility and the remarkable energy of Gutai’s most productive period. Highlights include two works initially presented at Maekawa’s first solo exhibition at the Gutai Pinacotheca, Osaka, which took place in November 1963: Untitled (A5) (1963) and Mountain with Lines (1963). The latter comes from a grouping of important works on loan from Axel Vervoordt Gallery, Antwerp, and once formed part of a monumental quadriptych whose other panels have since been lost.

Dominique Lévy previously held an exhibition of Maekawa’s works in New York in 2014. Tsuyoshi Maekawa will be held concurrently with an exhibition of fellow Gutai painter Kazuo Shiraga’s works at Lévy Gorvy’s Old Bond Street location (from 3 February – 25 March 2017). The gallery will also be collaborating with Axel Vervoordt Gallery for an exhibition of paintings by Shiraga at the latter’s new space in Antwerp, opening on March 8. By presenting simultaneous exhibitions by two Gutai masters across multiple venues in Europe, Lévy Gorvy will highlight the legacy of this influential avant-garde collective.

SALON at Saatchi Gallery will partner with major international galleries to present a wide platform dedicated to exhibiting work by established artists as well as artists’ estates in selling exhibitions.

Tsuyoshi Maekawa (b. 1936) was a member of the Gutai Art Association, Japan’s most significant avant-garde collective of the postwar era, founded in 1954. He was included in the 8th Gutai Exhibition at the Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art in 1959, and became a protégé of the group’s founder, Jiro Yoshihara. Following Maekawa’s first solo exhibition at the Gutai Pinacotheca in November 1963, the artist was represented in every Gutai event until the group’s eventual dissolution following Yoshihara’s death in 1972.

Maekawa’s efforts during this time were profoundly occupied with the materiality and three-dimensionality of painting. The artist created a series of works using burlap, cutting the fabric apart and adhering it to canvas, which he then painted over to create a rich, heterogeneous, metamorphic surface. Here, Maekawa made the radically objective nature of painting emerge in all its strangeness. This artistic practice served to subvert the representational, opening an immediate access to the thing itself—the artwork as matter rather than image. Although these works find their place in a lineage of paintings created using unconventional materials such as burlap, as in the work of Joan Miró, Paul Klee, and Alberto Burri, they also stand apart as evidence of a highly independent investigation into abstract texture and the visual relationship of the fluid materiality of the artistic medium with geographic and biomorphic forms.

Literally meaning ‘concrete’, the word Gutai was intended by Yoshihara to express the idea that art constitutes the embodied, material manifestation of human spiritual freedom. While often closely associated with the contemporaneous movements of Abstract Expressionism in the United States and Art Informel in France because of a shared exploration of performative painting, the multidisciplinary practice of Gutai artists pushed the boundaries between painting and performance, artwork and event, to such a degree that Allan Kaprow would praise the group as a pioneering force of the concept of the ‘Happening’ in Japan.

Maekawa has recently participated in a number of important group exhibitions, including Gutai: Splendid Playground, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2013; Tàpies: The eye of the artist, Palazzo Fortuny, Venice, 2013; Art Osaka 2013, Hotel Granvia, Osaka, 2013; Gutai: The Spirit of an Era, The National Art Center, Tokyo, 2012; Nul = 0, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 2011; Gutai Retrospective, Prefectural Museum of Art, Hyogo, 2004; and Gutai, Jeu de Paume National Gallery, Paris, 1999. His works can be found in several public collections, including: The National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto; The National Museum of Art, Osaka; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; and Ashiya City Museum of Art & History, Ashiya.

Saatchi Gallery and Huawei have teamed up to present From Selfie to Self-Expression. This is the world’s first exhibition exploring the history of the selfie from the old masters to the present day, and celebrates the truly creative potential of a form of expression often derided for its inanity.

The show also highlights the emerging role of the mobile phone as an artistic medium for self-expression by commissioning ten exciting young British photographers to create new works using Huawei’s newest breakthrough dual lens smartphones co-engineered with Leica.