The first in this series of exhibitions is New Order: British Art Today, featuring 17 young artists based in the UK. The work of this new generation of artists offers an arresting insight into the nature of Britain today: somewhat nebulous in its identity, somewhat uncertain of itself, recent spikes of national cohesion – the 2011 royal wedding, the 2012 Olympics – are blasts of pageantry, quickly silenced, sometimes soured. The symbols of national identity seem more and more inarticulate and dislocated from the experience of actually living here.
The artists are not an evidently coherent group, but if there is a collective spirit in many of the works in the exhibition, it’s in their interest in addressing the vast abundance of imagery which we are all increasingly surrounded by in the 21st century. As the series of exhibitions continues, a clearer understanding may emerge of a distinct new direction.
The exhibition includes sculptural forms that owe a debt to American minimalism, paintings that mine British caricature from the 18th century, the iconography of earthly power (kings and politicians), everyday elements from ordinary life (tattoos, underpants, banana skins), industrial materials as well as traditional oil paint and gouache.
Gaiety is the Most Outstanding Feature of the Soviet Union: Art from Russia’ is the first exhibition of contemporary Russian art at the Saatchi Gallery. This large survey show features 18 artists working in diverse ways across the mediums of painting, photography, sculpture and installation.
Most of the artists in the exhibition, which takes its title from a speech delivered by Joseph Stalin in 1935, are young and emerging, and have rarely shown their work internationally; the exhibition will also present Boris Mikhailov’s highly acclaimed photographic project, Case History, which documents his hometown of Kharkov following the disintegration of the Soviet Union.
Witnesses to the break-up of the Soviet Union and the perestroika years, the artists in this exhibition have absorbed the complexities of life in Russia and created a wide variety of works in response. Some of them play on Russia’s long and rich tradition of jokes and a distinctive sense of humour which also find its way into political satire. Others draw on the influential wave of modernist art in Russia, particularly Malevich and Rodchenko, as well as important contemporary Russian artists such as Ilya Kabakov.
As Dimitri Ozerkov, director of the Contemporary Art Department of The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg, says about the artists in his introduction to the exhibition catalogue: “Their art is multifocal and transcendent, poetic and hypocritical, politicized and romantic. It is probably the most global art in the world but still very much related to its origins.”
The works in this exhibition will play a key role in shaping our understanding of recent Russian history as well as contemporary Russian art.
Out of Focus, the first major photography exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery since the highly acclaimed and controversial 2001 show I Am a Camera, presents 38 artists who offer an international perspective on current trends in photography, working with the medium in diverse, innovative and arresting ways.
This exhibition comes at a time when the world of photography is going through one of its richest and also most complicated moments. Millions of images are being uploaded onto the internet every day making available more visual stimuli than ever before; old ideas about ’professional’ and ‘amateur’ photographers are being upturned; the traditional boundaries between various territories within the world of photography – fashion, documentary, advertising and art – are blurring into one another in unexpected, exciting and not always tension-free ways; and even the labels ‘artist’ and ‘photographer’ are the subject of debate (Olaf Breuning responds to this thorny topic by describing himself as “a four-wheel drive, all-purpose terrain vehicle”).
Against the backdrop of this new world of the photographic image, Out of Focus brings together 38 artists from the US, UK, Japan, South Africa, Australia, Switzerland, France, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Turkey and Benin.
Gesamtkunstwerk: New Art from Germany showcases 24 artists, most of whom have been little seen in the UK, but are rapidly establishing themselves in Germany and internationally. Their work, including sculpture, painting, drawing and installation, ranges from the grotesque and macabre to the lyrical and surreal, reflecting the diversity of German art now.
Perhaps best known for its Wagnerian associations, the word ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’ can be translated as a total, ideal or universal work of art, or as a synthesis of different art forms into one all-embracing unique genre. As such, many works in this exhibition reflect on the boundaries of art, in terms of our perception of it and its relationship to other disciplines. If their work points to a new kind of Gesamtkunstwerk it is one in which high and low culture, the avantgarde and the historical, the everyday and everything in between can co-exist.
Running through the exhibition is an inherent reference to another quasi-Gesamtkunstwerk: the baggage of postwar German visual culture and the work of earlier generations of German artists, from the Expressionists to Joseph Beuys, Anselm Kiefer, Martin Kippenberger, Rosemarie Trockel, Gerhard Richter and Franz West, with whom many of the artists in this exhibition seem to be in conversation.
The Shape of Things to Come: New Sculpture provides an unprecedented look at some of the most exciting sculptural works created in recent years. From granite monoliths to neon structures, buckled cars to stuffed horse hide, the exhibition demonstrates the diversity and dynamism of the medium.
Composed, assembled, sewn, nailed, glued, stacked or layered from materials as varied as clay, polished metal, fabric, plywood, dirt, horse hide, Styrofoam and found objects, the works in the exhibition push the notions of the already expanded field of sculpture. The pieces here are united in the strength of their formal innovations and force of their engagement with contemporary issues. Running from the monumental to the miniature, many of the works play with scale creating a disorienting and charged space between viewer and work. Figurative forms, both human and animal, are used as sites of anxiety and instability challenging art historical archetypes to create a rich new sculptural vocabulary.
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.
