Archives: Exhibitions

In an age where painting has become one strand among many in contemporary art making, Painters’ Painters brings together a small group of distinctive figures in the field.

In recent years, painting has been challenged by the myriad of other modern media and technologies embraced by contemporary art. It is less frequently seen in contemporary museums and galleries today and is seemingly out of favour with many curators.

Painters’ Painters focuses on a group of artists who have been undeterred by the gradual decline in interest in this perennial art form.

Champagne Life celebrates the work of a constellation of female artists, and provides a rare and apposite moment to reflect on what it means to be a female artist working today.

Champagne Life suggests high living, prestige and affluence, qualities that have led to champagne’s appropriation into Hip-Hop culture as an indicator of success when artists transition from economically depressed ghetto to uptown highlife.

Applied here to an exhibition bringing together the work of 14 emerging women artists, the irony of the title is palpable and throws into contrast the reality of many long, cold, lonely hours working in the studio with the perceived glamour of the art world.

EXHIBITIONISM is the first international exhibition on The Rolling Stones.


Taking over the entire two floors of the Saatchi Gallery with 9 thematic galleries, EXHIBITIONISM combines over 500 original Stones’ artefacts, with striking cinematic and interactive technologies offering the most comprehensive and immersive insight into the band’s fascinating fifty year history.


From never before seen dressing room and backstage paraphernalia to rare instruments; original stage designs, iconic costumes, rare audio tracks and video footage; personal diaries; poster and album cover artwork; and unique wraparound cinematic experiences that celebrate every aspect of their careers. Centre stage is the musical heritage that took them from a London blues band in the early 1960s to inspirational cultural icons.


The Rolling Stones have shaped popular culture, often in their own image, and this exhibition will offer a unique perspective that only the band’s own archive can provide. Collaborations and work by a vast array of artists, designers, musicians and writers will be included – from Andy Warhol, Shepard Fairey, Alexander McQueen, and Ossie Clark to Tom Stoppard and Martin Scorsese.


EXHIBITIONISM will be promoted and presented by Australian company iEC (International Entertainment Consulting) with the full participation of Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Charlie Watts and Ronnie Wood.
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Pangaea II: New Art From Africa and Latin America features the work of 18 emerging artists who provide an expansive insight into the work being produced against the backdrop of present day complexities in their respective homelands.

Witnesses to the transformation of their societies, the artists working in these two distinctive regions are increasingly based within cities that are changing at an unprecedented rate. Their work employs a hybrid of traditional and contemporary techniques and materials, reflecting on social and political issues faced during this period of rapid urban and economic expansion.

Including sculpture, painting, installation and photography, Pangaea II: New Art From Africa and Latin America explores the diverse cultural influences and thriving creative practices in the two great continents that were once conjoined as the prehistoric landmass of Pangaea.

Taking its title from the prehistoric landmass comprised of Africa and America, this major survey reunites the two former sister continents by bringing together the work of 16 of their contemporary artists. The exhibition celebrates and explores the parallels between their distinctly diverse cultures and creative practices, as they begin to receive recognition in the increasingly globalised art world.

In Europe and USA, Modern Art has typically advanced through a constant renewal innovative ideas and movements. We are now experiencing an important shift as artists and collectors seek to explore new art in regions outside their immediate geographical and historic context for inspiration.

The desire by artists and their audiences to discover fresh influences from a broader body of work has been facilitated by newly forged commercial and political alliances and the increasing ease of international communication and transportation. Important art fairs and biennales emerging in nations previously considered on the periphery, coupled with the recent preoccupation of museums to broaden their Eurocentric collections, have led to art from further afield becoming part of an international narrative during a global awakening in the arts.

The exhibition features nine contemporary artists working in a variety of mediums. Far from being reductive, their work if often complex and diverse. They employ techniques from folk art, ideas from performance art and borrow the language of post-war abstract expressionism as readily as those of digitised computer motifs and popular culture. By adapting these different visual languages, the artists in Abstract America Today create an exciting range of work celebrating the legacy of Abstraction. Like America itself, their work is epic and expansive, loud and confident, reflecting the simultaneous brutality and romance of the big city and the big country.

The programme of exhibitions continues the Saatchi Gallery’s 25-year-long support of emerging artists and its drive to make contemporary art as widely accessible as possible. An entire floor has been devoted to exhibiting artists in the early stages of their careers, and enables young artists to have their work displayed in a museum environment. It also gives visitors to the Gallery a chance to discover some of the most exciting artists working in the UK.

New Order II: British Art Today features 13 artists who offer an arresting insight into art being made in the UK today. From sculpture and painting, to installation and video, this selection of artists employ a hybrid of traditional and contemporary techniques and materials, which revitalise existing visual languages.

Abstraction returns in the shape of interior décor in George Little’s paintings, with satirical intent in Dan Rees’ plasticine covered panels, or revived in unconventional and contrasting materials in Dominic Beattie’s pieces. Virgile Ittah’s wax figures droop as they succumb to Virgile Ittah, Regarding The Pain Of The Other, 2013 gravity; Finbar Ward’s paintings are stacked on the floor like minimalist sculptures; and the sensory and sonic are embodied in Hannah Perry’s immersive installation.

Over the last fifty years or so, work depicting the body, such as paintings by British artists Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, was at odds with the prevailing currents of abstraction, Pop and conceptualism. Yet the figure has retained its currency, and the artists in Body Language each provide compelling evidence of the figure’s continued ability to articulate something both historically specific and curiously essential.

From the grotesque and uncanny to the poignant and satirical, the works in this exhibition examine, in arresting and innovative ways, the diverse social and political issues that can be communicated through the human body.

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.