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Saatchi Gallery

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The Saatchi Gallery's new premises in Chelsea, opening 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 Chelsea (opening to the public in 2008). 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.

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.

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 instigated several large philanthropic donations including one hundred 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, who was, however, not involved with it, having previously fallen out with Saatchi. As well as work by other YBAs, such as Jake and Dinos Chapman and Tracey Emin, there was the inclusion of 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 little-known artists working in a variety of media, including installation and machinery. It received a hostile critical reception, which caused Saatchi to speak out angrily and uncharacteristically against the critics.[1]

On 24 May, 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. Saatchi was reported to be distraught at the loss. One art insurance specialist valued the lost work at £50m.

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. Future shows in the series are scheduled to introduce Britain to young painters from America like Dana Schutz and Germans such as Matthias Weischer, as well as Saatchi's choice of up and coming British talent.

At the same time, Saatchi sold works from his YBA collection, beginning in December 2004 with Hirst's iconic shark for nearly £7 million (he had bought it for £50,000 in 1991), and was dismissive of the historic longevity of the YBAs (apart from Hirst).

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.[2] 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 designed by architects Paul Davis + Partners. There is currently a halt to London shows while these new premises are being prepared. A selection from The Triumph of Painting was exhibited in Leeds Art Gallery and new American art at the Royal Academy in London.

In 2006 Saatchi’s exhibition 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.

"Your Gallery" on 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 is called Your Gallery,[3] 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 65 million hits a day. In July 2008, the internet research organisation Alexa Internet ranked Saatchi Online 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, free of commission to either buyer or seller. In 2008 Saatchi Online launched a Saleroom section that posts 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 Your Gallery. In November 2006 the Saatchi Gallery launched a new site within Your Gallery exclusively for art students, called Stuart.[4] 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.

There are other spaces on Your Gallery for a forum, blogs, street art, videos and for meeting new people. A daily art magazine features 24 hour art news updates, as well as commissioned articles and reviews by well known art critics such as Jerry Saltz and Matthew Collings.

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 [1] that is open to all schools with pupils aged between 5 – 17.

Saatchi Online has recently expanded to Asian audiences with a Mandarin 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.

Chelsea

The gallery is currently refurbishing the whole of the 70,000-square-foot (6,500 m2) space of the Duke of York's Headquarters building on Kings Road, London, near to Sloane Square with architects Paul Davis + Partners. A virtual tour is available on the gallery website and shows spacious rooms in classic "white wall" gallery style. The inaugural exhibition will be The Revolution Continues: New Art from China, bringing together the work of 30 of China’s leading young artists in a wide reaching survey of recent painting, sculpture and installation.

Statistics

  • At County Hall the gallery received 600,000 visitors a year.
  • There have been over 1,000 school visits.

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,[5] 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.[6][7] (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,[8] 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.

Boundary Road

Books

  • 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

Citations

  1. ^ thisislondon.com
  2. ^ guardian.co.uk
  3. ^ saatchigallery.com
  4. ^ saatchigallery.com
  5. ^ www.guardian.co.uk
  6. ^ Hermione Eyre, "Talk of the Town", The Independent on Sunday 2005-01-30.
  7. ^ Nigel Reynolds, "Saatchi's Latest Shock For The Art World Is Painting", Daily Telegraph], 2004-10-04
  8. ^ royalacademy.org.uk

51°30′07″N 0°07′10″W / 51.50194°N 0.11944°W / 51.50194; -0.11944

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