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.
On 30 January the Saatchi Gallery’s second show, Unveiled: New Art From the Middle East opened, presenting the work of over 20 of the region’s most exciting artists. Dedicated to the flourishing contemporary Arabic art scene, the exhibition offered a cutting edge survey of recent painting, sculpture and installation.
Despite a long-standing visual tradition going back several centuries and a fiercely independent creative mindset, new artists from the Middle East have been largely overlooked internationally because of the widespread political conflict that dominates the region. However, in recent years the contemporary art scene in Cairo, Tehran, Beirut, Jordan and Dubai has become more vibrant and active than ever before. In about five years Abu Dhabi will be the home of one of the most dense concentrations of cultural resources in the world, while artists from the region are shattering tidy preconceptions to present an extraordinarily diverse range of artistic expression emerging from the Middle East and its Diaspora.
