Saatchi Gallery

The Saatchi Gallery's new premises in Chelsea, which opened in October 2008.

The Saatchi Gallery is a London gallery for contemporary art, opened by Charles Saatchi in 1985 in order to show his sizeable (and changing) collection to the public. It has occupied different premises, first in North London, then the South Bank by the River Thames and currently in Chelsea. Saatchi's collection, and hence the gallery's shows, have had distinct phases, starting with US artists and minimalism, moving on to the Damien Hirst-led Young British Artists, followed by shows purely of painting and more recently promoting once again art from America in an exhibition entitled USA Today at the Royal Academy in London. Presently on show is The Revolution Continues: New Art From China - the inaugural exhibition in the new Duke of York's HQ venue.

The gallery has been a major influence on art in Britain since its opening. It has also had a history of media controversy, which it has courted, and has had extremes of critical reaction. Many artists shown at the gallery are unknown not only to the general public but also to the commercial art world: showing at the gallery has provided a springboard to launch careers.

Boundary Road

The Saatchi Gallery opened in 1985 in a disused paint factory in Boundary Road, St John's Wood, London, and ran a series of exhibitions, showing many American artists such as Andy Warhol, Cy Twombly, Richard Serra, Brice Marden, Bruce Nauman, Donald Judd, Carl Andre, Sol LeWitt, Alex Katz, Jeff Koons and Philip Guston many of whom were to influence the subsequent generation of Young British Artists who followed in the 1990s. The Saatchi Gallery in Boundary Road was unusual in London for its large, open space, filled with light reflected by high white walls and its 30,000 sq ft (2787.0912 m2) of gallery space devoted to recent art.

Damien Hirst

In an abrupt move, Saatchi sold much of his collection of US art, and invested in a new generation of British artists, exhibiting them in shows with his own title Young British Artists (YBAs). The core of the artists had been brought together by Damien Hirst in 1988 in a seminal show called Freeze. Saatchi augmented this with his own choice of purchases from art colleges and "alternative" artist-run spaces in London. His first showing of the YBAs was in 1992, where the star exhibit was a vitrine by Hirst containing a shark in formaldehyde and entitled The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living. This was funded by Saatchi.

More recently Saatchi has been dismissive of the importance of Freeze:

It’s not that Freeze, the 1988 exhibition that Damien Hirst organised with this fellow Goldsmiths College students, was particularly good. Much of the art was fairly so-so and Hirst himself hadn’t made anything much just a cluster of small colourful cardboard boxes placed high on a wall. What really stood out was the hopeful swagger of it all.

Saatchi's promotion of these artists dominated UK art throughout the nineties and brought them to worldwide notice. Among the artists in the groundbreaking series of shows were Jenny Saville, Sarah Lucas, Gavin Turk, Jake and Dinos Chapman and Rachel Whiteread. (Tracey Emin was initially hostile to Saatchi and was only finally included in the 1997 Sensation show.)

Sensation opened in September 1997 at the Royal Academy in London to much controversy and showed 110 works by 42 artists from the Saatchi collection. In 1999 Sensation toured to The National Galerie at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin in the autumn, and then to the Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York, creating unprecedented political and media controversy and becoming a touchstone for debate about the “morality” of contemporary art.

Meanwhile other shows with different themes were held in the gallery itself. In 1998 Saatchi launched a two part exhibition entitled Neurotic Realism, though widely attacked by critics the exhibition included many artists who were later recognised as international stars including; Cecily Brown, Ron Mueck, Noble and Webster, Dexter Dalwood, Martin Maloney, Chantal Joffe, Michael Raedecker and David Thorpe. In 2000 Ant Noises (an anagram of "sensation"), also in two parts, tried surer ground with work by Hirst, Lucas, Saville, Whiteread, the Chapmans, Turk, Emin and Chris Ofili.

During this period, The Saatchi Gallery made several large philanthropic donations including 100 artworks in 1999 to the Arts Council of Great Britain Collection, which operates a ‘lending library’ to museums and galleries around Britain, with the aim of increasing awareness and promoting interest in younger artists; 40 works by young British artists through the National Arts Collection Fund, now known as The Art Fund, to eight museum collections across Britain in 2000; and 50 artworks to the Paintings in Hospitals programme which provides a lending library of over 3000 original works of art to NHS hospitals, hospices and health centres throughout England, Wales and Ireland in 2002.

County Hall

The Saatchi Gallery was based at County Hall 2003-2005

In April 2003, the gallery moved to County Hall, the Greater London Council's former headquarters on the South Bank, occupying 40,000 ft² (3,700 m²) of the ground floor. There were 1,000 guests at the launch, which included a "nude happening" of 200 naked people staged by artist Spencer Tunick.

The opening exhibition included a retrospective by Damien Hirst, as well as work by other YBAs, such as Jake and Dinos Chapman and Tracey Emin alongside some longer established artists including John Bratby, Paula Rego and Patrick Caulfield.

In 2004, Saatchi's recent acquisitions (including Stella Vine) were featured in New Blood, a show of mostly then-little-known artists working in a variety of media. It received a hostile critical reception, which caused Saatchi to speak out angrily and uncharacteristically against the critics.

In 2005, Saatchi showed a major change of direction with the announcement of a year-long, three-part series (subsequently extended to two years and seven-part), The Triumph of Painting. The opening exhibition focused on a number of already established European painters, including Marlene Dumas, Martin Kippenberger, Luc Tuymans and Peter Doig, who had not previously received such significant exposure in the UK.

The gallery's tenancy of County Hall had ongoing difficulties with Makoto Okamoto, London branch manager of the owners, who Saatchi complained had kicked artworks and sealed off the disabled toilets. On September 27, 2005 the gallery announced they would be moving to new premises. On October 7, 2005 a court case began against the gallery, brought by County Hall landlords, Cadogan Leisure Investments, and owners Shirayama Shokusan Co Ltd, for alleged breach of conditions, including a two-for-one ticket offer in Time Out magazine and exhibition of work in unauthorised areas. The judgement went against the gallery, who were forced to relinquish the premises, though the gallery had already announced it was moving to take on the entire Duke of York’s HQ building in Chelsea.

In 2006 a selection from The Triumph of Painting was exhibited in Leeds Art Gallery in February and USA Today: New American Art from the Saatchi Gallery opened at the Royal Academy in London. This exhibition toured to The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg, Russia in 2007.

Duke of York's HQ

The gallery is currently situated in the 70,000-square-foot (6,500 m²) space of the Duke of York's HQ on Kings Road, London, near to Sloane Square. The building was refurbished with the help of architects Paul Davis + Partners and Allford Hall Monaghan Morris.

The new gallery opened on 9th of October 2008, showcasing new Chinese art in the exhibition The Revolution Continues: New Art From China, bringing together the work of 24 of China’s leading young artists in a wide reaching survey of recent painting, sculpture and installation. The exhibition features artists such as Zhang Huan, Li Songsong, Zhang Xiaogang, Zhang Haiying,and controversial conceptual artists Sun Yuan & Peng Yu. The exhibition is accompanied by a book of the same name published by Jonathan Cape. The book presents the work alongside in-depth discussion of relevant cultural influences by Jiang Jiehong, director of the Centre for Chinese Visual Arts at the UCE Birmingham Institute of Art and Design.

The Revolution Continues has received positive reviews from the press, with many hailing the exhibition - and the new premises - as a triumphant return to form.

The gallery consists of 15 simple, equally proportioned, light-filled exhibition spaces, which provide an unobtrusive backdrop for the art, and includes a dedicated space for Saatchi Online artists to exhibit and sell their work commission free. The space will feature a rotating selection of artists chosen from Saatchi Online Magazine’s weekly critics’ picks and the online Showdown competition .

The Saatchi Gallery is the only completely free-entry contemporary art museum of its size in the world - this is enabled by the gallery's partnership with leading contemporary art auction house Phillips de Pury & Company. Phillips de Pury & Company have their own room within the gallery to display "art environments", the first of which will showcase new pieces by Julian Schnabel. Also featured is the Project Room which will serve to exhibit work by an artist in the collection independent of the current exhibition in the main galleries; the first selection will be Newsroom Cops and Teens, 21 drawings by Aleksandra Mir inspired by tabloids from New York.

In its last year at County Hall, 1,350 schools organised group visited the gallery. The new gallery is expanding its education programme, and houses special education rooms for visiting schools, colleges, universities, and groups. This will be combined with online resources to make contemporary art as accessible as possible to young people.

The new venue also features a café and a bookshop. A virtual tour [11] is available on the gallery website and shows spacious rooms in classic "white wall" gallery style.

Following The Revolution Contines is Unveiled: New Art From the Middle East, featuring work by Diana Al-Hadid, Tala Madani, Ahmed Alsoudani and Rokni Haerizadeh. Further planned exhibitions include Shape of Things To Come: New Sculpture which will focus on European and American sculptors including Olaf Breuning, Terence Koh, and Rachel Harrison; and The Empire Strikes Back: New Indian Art Today, which will be the largest exhibition of contemporary Indian art exhibited in Britain to date. This show will feature artists such Subodh Gupta, Jitish Kallat, and Huma Mulji.

Saatchi Website

In 2006, during the period in limbo between premises, the Saatchi Gallery website began an open-access section, the most well-known aspect of which was called Your Gallery, where artists can upload up to 8 works of art and a biography onto their own page. Over 100,000 artists have done so, and the site receives an estimated 68 million hits a day. Your Gallery was later rebranded as Saatchi Online. In July 2008, the internet research organisation Alexa Internet ranked Saatchi Gallery at 316 in world’s Top 50,000 sites. In November 2007 it was estimated that the professional artists registered on the website sell over $100 million of art directly from the site annually. In 2008 Saatchi Online launched a Saleroom section that hosts over 84,000 entries from artists wishing to sell their work. The site takes no commission from either buyer or seller.

In October 2006 the Saatchi Gallery in association with the Guardian newspaper opened the first ever reader-curated exhibition, showing the work of 10 artists registered on Saatchi Online; users also have the opportunity to be featured in the Saatchi Online stall at various art fairs. In November 2006 the Saatchi Gallery launched a new site within Saatchi Online exclusively for art students, called Stuart. Art students from all over the world can have their own home pages with images of their art, photos, lists of their favourite artists, books, films and television shows, and links to their friends' home pages. The site also allows students to chat online with each other, enabling art students across the globe to talk and exchange ideas about their art work. An annual competition in association with Channel 4 - 4 New Sensations - is run via the Stuart section of the site.

There are other spaces on Saatchi Online for meeting new people, a forum, live chat, blogs, videos, photography and illustration. The site also publishes grant and funding opportunities for artists. A daily art magazine features 24 hour art news updated every 15 minutes, as well as articles and reviews by well known art critics such as Jerry Saltz and Matthew Collings. The site recently began broadcasting an online television channel which gives visitors video access to art openings, artists' studios, performances and interviews.

Interactive features include the weekly Showdown competition which puts users' art works in head-to-head competition to win a place in an exhibition in the Gallery[12], the Online Studio which allows visitors to create art on the website (each month a critic selects a winner in whose name a £500 donation is made to a children's charity)[13], a Crits section in which artists can leave each other feedback on specific art works[14] and the Street Art section which acts an international forum and display resource for graffiti, murals, performance art and various other found images[15].

One new feature was added beginning 2007 called "Museums around the World" where over 3300 museums can now be visited online, showing high-lights of their collections, exhibitions and other relevant information. These include The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, The Museum of Modern Art in New York and The Tate and National Gallery (London) in London, The Louvre in Paris, and the State Hermitage in Russia, to relatively small museums all across the world.

As of July 2008, 4,300 art dealers and commercial galleries have loaded up their profiles on the site. Over 2800 of the world’s top universities and colleges have loaded their prospectuses and student information on the site. These range from Yale, Harvard, the University of Cambridge and the University of Oxford to local art colleges across the world. And over 1500 schools have loaded up their pupils’ art work. These schools range from Eton College in the UK to small Primary and High schools in the US. This section of the site is expected to grow with the establishment of the Portfolio Schools Prize [16] that is open to all schools with pupils aged between 5 – 17.

Saatchi Online has recently expanded to Asian audiences with a Mandarin language version of the site that allows Chinese artists to load up their profiles in Chinese and to be read in English. Although the site offers automated translations in most of the world’s leading languages, the Chinese site has been custom built to create a fully interactive version of the site with a Chinese language chatroom, forum, blog etc. Bespoke Russian and Spanish/Portuguese versions of the site are planned for other countries with large populations that speak little English.

Saatchi Gallery Timeline

1985 – Charles Saatchi opens the 30 000 square foot Saatchi Gallery at Boundary Road, London NW8, featuring many key works by Donald Judd, Brice Marden, Cy Twombly and Andy Warhol. This was the first UK exhibition for Twombly and Marden.

1986 – The Saatchi Gallery exhibits works by Anselm Kiefer and Richard Serra. The caretaker’s flat and one wall of the gallery was demolished in order to allow the installation of large Serra sculptures.

1987 – The New York Art Now show introduces artists including Jeff Koons, Robert Gober, Ashley Bickerton, Carroll Dunham and Phillip Taaffe for the first time to the UK. The blend of minimalism and pop art has a profound influence on British art students.

1988-1991 ¬– The gallery introduces artists including; Leon Golub, Phillip Guston, Sigmar Polke, Bruce Nauman, Richard Artschwager and Cindy Sherman to British viewers.

1992 – The Saatchi Gallery curates its first in a series of shows entitled Young British Artists introducing the term “YBA” for this generation of artists. Damien Hirst, Marc Quinn, Rachel Whiteread, Gavin Turk, Glenn Brown, Sarah Lucas, Jenny Saville and Gary Hume were all presented to a wider public in these shows.

1997 – Sensation: Young British Art from the Saatchi Gallery opens at the Royal Academy of Arts featuring 42 artists including The Chapman Brothers, Marcus Harvey, Damien Hirst, Ron Mueck, Jenny Saville, Sarah Lucas & Tracey Emin. Sensation attracted over 300 000 visitors, a record breaking attendance for a contemporary art exhibition.

1999 – Sensation travels to The National Galerie at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin in the autumn, breaking attendance records.

1999 – Sensation tours to Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York, creating unprecedented political and media controversy and becoming a touchstone for debate about the “morality” of contemporary art. This exhibition also broke attendance records at the museum.

1999 – The Saatchi Gallery donates one hundred artworks to the Arts Council of Great Britain Collection, which operates a ‘lending library’ to museums and galleries around Britain, with the aim of increasing awareness and promoting interest in younger artists.

2000 – The Gallery donates 40 works by young British artists through the National Arts Collection Fund to eight museum collections across Britain.

2000 – The Gallery begins a series of one person shows of major international figures who have been largely unseen in Britain, including Duane Hanson, Boris Mikhailov and Alex Katz. Shows entitled Young Americans and Eurovision introduce a number of artists to the UK including John Currin, Andreas Gursky, Charles Ray, Richard Prince, Rineke Dijkstra, Lisa Yuskavage and Elizabeth Peyton.

2001 – I am a Camera exhibition opens at the Gallery, an exhibition of photography and other related works where traditional boundaries are blurred as photographs influence paintings, and paintings influence photographs. The show included work by many artists who had never exhibited before in the UK.

2002 – The Gallery donates 50 artworks to the Paintings in Hospitals programme which provides a lending library of over 3 000 original works of art to NHS hospitals, hospices and health centres throughout England, Wales and Ireland.

2003 – The Saatchi Gallery moved to County Hall, the Greater London Council’s former headquarters on the South Bank, creating a 40 000 square foot exhibition space. The opening show included a retrospective by Damien Hirst as well as works by other YBAs such as the Chapman Brothers, Tracey Emin, Jenny Saville and Sarah Lucas. There were 1,000 guests at the launch, which included a "nude happening" of 200 naked people staged by artist Spencer Tunick.

2004 – A fire in the Momart storage warehouse destroyed many works from the collection, including the major Tracey Emin work Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–95 ("the tent"), and Jake and Dinos Chapman's tableau Hell.

2005 – The Saatchi Gallery launches a year-long, three-part series exhibition, The Triumph of Painting. The opening exhibition focuses on a number of influential European painters, Marlene Dumas, Martin Kippenberger, Luc Tuymans, Peter Doig, Jörg Immendorff, and followed with younger painters including Albert Oehlen, Wilhelm Sasnal and Thomas Scheibitz.

2005 – The gallery announced it was moving to take on the entire Duke of York’s Headquarters building in Chelsea. This put a halt to London shows while the new premises were being prepared.

2005 – A selection of works from The Triumph of Painting was exhibited in Leeds Art Gallery

2006 -– During the period in between premises, the Saatchi Gallery website began an open-access section where artists could upload works of art and a biography onto their own pages. The site currently has over 100 000 artist’s profiles and receives over 68 million hits a day, and is ranked at 316 in the Alexa Top 50 000 World Websites.

2006 – The Saatchi Gallery in association with the Guardian newspaper opened the first ever reader-curated exhibition, showing the work of 10 artists registered on Saatchi Online. In November the Saatchi Gallery launched a new site within Saatchi Online exclusively for art students, called Stuart. Art students from all over the world were able to create their own home pages with images of their art, photos, lists of their favourite artists, books, films and television shows, and links to their friends' home pages. The site also allows students to chat online with each other, enabling art students across the globe to talk and exchange ideas about their art work. Other sections on Saatchi Online include; a daily art magazine, a forum, written and video blogs, as well as sections for street art, photography and illustration.

2006 – USA Today: New American Art from the Saatchi Gallery opens at the Royal Academy in London

2007 – A new feature was added to Saatchi Online at the beginning of 2007 called "Museums around the World" where over 2 800 museums can now be found online, showing highlights of their collections, exhibitions and other relevant information. 2 700 Colleges and Universities from around the world also include their profiles, enabling potential students to examine their prospectuses.

2007– USA Today: New American Art from the Saatchi Gallery toured to The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg, Russia.

2008¬ The Saatchi Gallery reopens on the 9th of October in the entire 70 000 square feet Duke of York’s Headquarters building on Kings Road in Chelsea, London. The inaugural exhibition is The Revolution Continues: New Art from China, bringing together the work of 24 of China’s leading young artists in a wide reaching survey of recent painting, sculpture and installation.

Statistics

• At County Hall the gallery received 800,000 visitors a year.
• There were over 1,350 school visits in 2006.

Controversy

• In 1989 Julian Schnabel, Sean Scully and (particularly) Sandro Chia complained about the disposal of their work from the collection. They had assumed it was part of a permanent collection, though this had never been promised.
• In 1997, in Sensation, London, Marcus Harvey's giant painting of Myra Hindley made from children's hand prints, provoked an outcry from the parents of the murdered children. It was attacked with eggs and ink and had to be restored.
• Chris Ofili's Holy Virgin Mary in Sensation in New York offended Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who had not seen the show but still called the work an "aggressive vicious, disgusting attack on religion", and threatened to withdraw funding from the Brooklyn Museum. This did not happen and the show went ahead. Nevertheless, the exhibition was refused by the National Gallery of Australia, which had been scheduled to show it.
• In March 2001 police visited the gallery's exhibition I Am a Camera, which featured Tierney Gearon's photos of her two young children, including a naked pose. The press reported police threats to seize the work, but this was denied by the police and no further action was taken.

The Stuckists picket the opening of The Triumph of Painting at the gallery

• In 2004, media controversy arose over two paintings by ex-stripper, Stella Vine. One was of Princess Diana called Hi Paul Can You Come Over, showing the Princess with blood dripping from her lips. The other was of drug user Rachel Whitear, whose body was being exhumed at the time; Whitear's parents and the police appealed for the painting to be withdrawn, but it was not.
• In 2004 the Stuckists reported Saatchi to the Office of Fair Trading alleging unfair competition. The complaint was not upheld. They also picketed the opening of The Triumph of Painting claiming that Saatchi had stolen their ideas. (Vine had previously been involved with the Stuckists.)
• In 2006 the work of several artists in "USA Today", an exhibition of contemporary American art from the Saatchi Gallery at the Royal Academy in London, provoked controversy in the media and among some Royal Academicians who called for certain works to be installed in an 'adult-only' room. A notice advising 'parental guidance' before viewing the work of Dash Snow and Gerald Davis was posted by the Royal Academy, on a wall outside the room in which the controversial works were hung: Dash Snow's 'Fuck the Police', in which newspaper cuttings relating to police corruption are smeared with the artist's own semen, and a painting entitled Monica by Gerald Davis in which a young woman engages in fellatio.

Artists shown at the Saatchi Gallery

Boundary Road

1985

• Donald Judd
• Brice Marden
• Cy Twombly
• Andy Warhol

1986

• Carl Andre
• Sol Lewitt
• Robert Ryman
• Frank Stella
• Dan Flavin

1987

• Anselm Kiefer
• Richard Serra
• Jeff Koons
• Robert Gober
• Philip Taaffe
• Carroll Dunham

1988

• Leon Golub
• Philip Guston
• Sigmar Polke

1989

• Robert Mangold
• Bruce Nauman

1990

• Leon Kossoff
• Frank Auerbach
• Lucian Freud

1991

• Richard Artschwager
• Andreas Serrano
• Cindy Sherman

1992

• Damien Hirst
• Rachel Whiteread

1993

• Sarah Lucas
• Marc Quinn

1994

• Jenny Saville
• Paula Rego

1995

• Gavin Turk
• Glenn Brown
• Gary Hume

1996

• Janine Antoni
• Tony Oursler
• Richard Prince
• Charles Ray
• Kiki Smith
• Stephan Balkenhol

1997

• Duane Hanson
• Andreas Gursky
• Martin Honert
• Thomas Ruff
• Thomas Schütte

1998

• David Salle
• Jessica Stockholder
• Terry Winters
• John Currin
• Tom Friedman
• Josiah McElheny
• Laura Owens
• Elizabeth Peyton
• Lisa Yuskavage

1999

• Alex Katz
• Martin Maloney
• Dexter Dalwood
• Ron Mueck
• Cecily Brown
• Noble and Webster
• Michael Raedecker

2000

• Boris Mikhailov

---

County Hall

• Damien Hirst
• The Chapman Brothers
• New Blood
• Galleon & Other Stories
• The Triumph of Painting

Duke of York's HQ

• The Revolution Continues: New Art From China

forthcoming:

• Unveiled: New Art from the Middle East
• The Triumph of Painting
• Out Of Focus: Photography Now
• The Power Of Paper

Books

• The Revolution Continues: New Art From China
• Sarah Kent, "Shark Infested Waters: The Saatchi Collection of British Art in the 90s", Philip Wilson Publishers Ltd, 2003, ISBN 0-85667-584-9.
• Rita Hatton and John A. Walker, "Supercollector, a Critique of Charles Saatchi", The Institute of Artology, 3rd edition 2005, paperback, ISBN 0-9545702-2-7
• USA Today
• The Triumph Of Painting
• The Triumph Of Painting, Supplementary Volume
• The Triumph Of Painting, Supplementary Volume
• 100 The Work That Changed British Art
• Hell, Jake & Dinos Chapman
• Paula Rego
• Young Americans
• Stephan Balkenhol
• Fiona Rae & Gary Hume
• Duane Hanson
• Shark Infested Waters, The Saatchi Collection Of British Art In The 90's
• Young German Artists 2
• Sensation
• Alex Katz: 25 Years Of Painting
• Young Americans 2
• Neurotic Realism
• Eurovision
• Ant Noises 1
• Ant Noises 2
• The Arts Council Gift
• I Am A Camera
• New Labour
• Young British Art
• Saatchi Decade
• Boris Mikhailov: Case History
• Damien Hirst

External links

• Official website of the Saatchi Gallery
• Interview with Charles Saatchi in Time Out London, October 2008
• BBC video coverage of The Revolution Continues
• Video review of The Revolution Continues from The Daily Telegraph
• The Revolution Contines in pictures, from the BBC
• Pictures of the gallery at County Hall highlights of the collection
• BBC report on the move to the new Chelsea location
• Charles Saatchi, Readers Q&A, The Art Newspaper
• Charles Saatchi, Readers Q&A, The Independent
• The Stuckists' criticisms
• Artists in USA Today
• STUART in The Independent November 30 2006
• STUART in The Sunday Times December 24 2006
• STUART in New York Times December 18 2006
• Saatchi Gallery Artabase page