A new music and art event launched in London's East End in October called Concrete and Glass.
Thirty alternative-site exhibitions, 18 music venues, 100 bands, and numerous local gallery exhibitions opened to the public on 2 October. Concrete and Glass showcased some of the best talent in music and contemporary art, taking the creative hub of Shoreditch and the East End as its inspiration.
Saatchi Online showed a selection of London-based artists in an exhibition at The Gallery at Beach Blanket Babylon on Bethnal Green Road. The exhibition ran from 2-19 October and all the works were for sale.
The Saatchi Online artists in the exhibition were:
Maurizio Anzeri, 'Late at Night', 2008
MAURIZIO ANZERI graduated in 2005 from the Slade School of Fine Art, London with an MA in Fine Art (Sculpture). In 2006 he had a solo show at Galleria Palladio, Lugano, and in October 2008 he will have a solo show at Alexandre Pollazzon, London, during Frieze week. He has exhibited his work in many group shows, most recently at Alexandre Pollazzon, London, WILDE Gallery, Berlin, ArteFiera, Bologna, Museo CAMEC, La Spezia, and the Kunsthalle Lucarno in Switzerland. He has collaborated on projects with Isabella Blow, Alexander McQueen and Eley Kishimoto. In the January 2008 edition of Flash Art, Anzeri was selected as one of the top 100 young emerging artists. As one of the 30 shortlisted artists for the 2008 Sovereign European Art Prize, his work will be exhibited at Somerset House in London this October.
'I work with sewing, embroidery and drawing to explore the essence of signs in their physical manifestation. I take inspiration from my own personal experience and observation of how, in other cultures, bodies themselves are treated as living graphic symbols. I then use sewing and embroidery in a further attempt to re-signify, and mark the space with a man-made sign, a trace. I am interested in people's stories and histories, and the relation between intimacy and the outer world. I have been working with hair for the past few years. I stitch and sew hair together until it becomes a sculpture. I see hair as a metaphorical medium to represent bodily boundaries, the embodiment of space.'
Carla Busuttil, 'He Is All Man', 2008
CARLA BUSUTTIL
Born1982 Johannesburg, South Africa. Lives and works in London
2005-2008, Postgraduate Diploma, Royal Academy of Arts, London
Deutsche Bank Pyramid Award, 2008
'My work explores notions of power and authority, as well as style and subjectivity. I have always been interested in politics, history and people in authority. I guess painting portraits of political figures is a very direct way of trying to understand how histories are meted out and interlinked. It is important for me that my works are not restrained by judgment, but rather that there would be a tension between the recognition of these known figures and the way that they are painted. The style may be seen as being more significant than the content. It is also important that the works are not seen as a political statement because I feel that, although art can and does form political commentary, art cannot be primarily political. It is restrained by its place in society.'
Alex Crocker, 'Country Cures', 2008
ALEX CROCKER was born in Truro in 1981. He completed his BA at the University of Brighton in 2005 and is currently doing an MA at the Royal College of Art, London. His work was shortlisted for the 2007 Celeste Art Prize, and he has participated in various group shows in London, Edinburgh, Brighton and Nottingham.
'I paint an archetypal group of people who are seemingly obsessed with the progression and evolution of their race. I am working with memory, using the residue that permeates through our history. The aim is to question how and why we occasion images without the action, and if the potency of paint can begin to take on the nature of the transformation in the rituals portrayed. I want the paintings to work as hooks, snagging the viewer into a state of spiralling associations.'
Sarah Douglas, 'Untitled', 2008
SARAH DOUGLAS was born in 1982, Cape Town, South Africa, and lives in London. She graduated from an MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art in 2005. Since then she has exhibited widely both nationally and internationally, and her work is held in several high profile collections including Deutsche Bank, London and the Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, USA. Douglas' work was selected for the Jerwood Drawing Prize 2007, and other recent exhibitions include: Tipping Point, Purdy Hicks Gallery, London 2008; The Painting Room, Transition Gallery, London 2008; Lost Boys, Rod Barton Invites, London 2008 and Tamed & Framed, The Harris Museum, Preston 2007.
'My work is about discovering ways to materialise a very personal subject matter through an engagement with paint and the act of painting. Through an exploration of the mysterious territory between the real and the imagined, the representational and the abstract, forms come into being that demand to be worked with and resolved. The starting points for my work vary from images and objects to abstract forms and spaces, but the aim for the work is the same - to invest the material with a psychological and emotional charge. This charge goes on to create a pervading atmosphere of tension and disquiet around the work.'
Federico Gallo, 'Tribe', 2008
FEDERICO GALLO was born in Venice in 1975 and now lives in London. He completed his MA in Communication Art at the Royal College of Art, London, this year. Recent group exhibitions include: Drawing, An Exhibition & Oberon Award (RCA, UK), 21 Grams (Dazed & Confused Gallery, UK) Images 30 (The Old Truman Brewery, UK) FosterArt Summer Exhibition (UK) and Kunsthalle Lucarno (Switzerland). His work has appeared in Images 30, Ambitmagazine, Naked Punch(UK), The Age of Feminine Drawing(Hong Kong), and has been featured in the Independent (UK) and Folha de S.Paulo(Brazil).
'I draw on the images from the press to impose (and cover, rip, reveal) a personal emotional response to what touches me or shocks me. Mask and Tribe belong to a series of allegorical portraits and self-portraits that explore the inner and the social self.'
Nick Goss, 'Fata Morgana', 2008
NICK GOSS was born in 1981 in Bristol, UK, and lives and works in London. He graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art in London with a BA Hons (First) in 2006, and he is currently doing a Postgraduate Diploma in Fine Art at the Royal Academy Schools, London. He has shown his work in group shows at WILDE Gallery, Berlin, Alexandre Pollazzon, London, Kenny Schachter's ROVE gallery in London, and Nettie Horn, London.
'I look at the areas that occupy a place between land and water, liminal areas that are hidden, forsaken and somehow lost from people's consciousness. Recent trips to Spitsbergen in the North Artic, the Bolivian rainforest and to various points along the English coast have allowed me to document first hand the littered remains of human settlements left out in the midst of untamed nature. These places have a peculiar melancholic atmosphere, a sense of things ebbing, natural elements slowly erasing any trace of human presence.'
Joss McKinley, 'Underneath an Abject Window', 2006
JOSS MCKINLEY was born in Oxford in 1981, and lives and work in London. He received his MA from the London College of Communication in 2006. In 2007 he was in a group show entitled 'Between Today & Yesterday' at the Turnpike Gallery, Leigh, with contemporary photographers Idris Khan, Hannah Starkey and Richard Billingham. He had his first solo show in London earlier this year at the Exhibit Gallery in Clerkenwell. As one of the 30 shortlisted artists for the 2008 Sovereign European Art Prize, his work will be exhibited at Somerset House this October. A selection of his portraits has been acquired by the National Portrait Gallery, London, for their permanent collection, and his work is available from the Photographers' Gallery Print Room in London.
'This series, Underneath an Abject Window, 2005 - 2006, deals with the themes of transience and loss. These photographs focus in particular on the subject of death, prompted by my finding a large number of wasps, which had, over the course of several months, died on my windowsill. The number of these dead insects was not only puzzling and aesthetically intriguing, but in time each new death made me question the level of regard I held for the insects. Having grown up as a son of a taxidermist there was perhaps an instinctive character trait, which lead me to collect and photograph them. After photographing the wasps I began to notice other creatures that had died, or were dying in and around my home in London - each of which seemed to have a visual power, even when motionless. Shot on large format, there is an intimacy that brings the viewer face to face with these creatures, many of which usually avoid human contact.'
Whitney McVeigh, 'Culture', 2008
WHITNEY MCVEIGH was born in New York in 1968, and lives and works in London. She studied at the Edinburgh College of Art where she began to explore visual arts in relation to sculptural form and study of the portrait head. McVeigh has travelled extensively for her work, with significant periods spent in Europe, India and China whilst keeping a home base in the UK. In 2006 she attended the Salon of Louise Bourgeois in New York where she gave a short talk about her current work. In February 2007, McVeigh was artist in resident at NY Arts in their Beijing space where she was shown with another British painter. In November 2007, she showed at the Broadway Gallery in New York. She has recently returned from Mexico (August 2008) where she was resident artist at Centro de Las Artes, San Augustin. McVeigh is currently represented by Being 3 Gallery in China and Cat Street Gallery in Hong Kong. She will have a solo show in early 2009 at Being 3 in Beijing. Her Heads series has featured in The Times, Financial Times and NY Arts magazine.
'The Heads look beneath the surface of representation revealing a kind of raw exploration of the psyche. The paintings are an intimate study of human truth. Through the fluid nature of the materials, each image attempts to unsettle the observer's conventional assumption of reality.'
Mark Melvin, 'It's OK I Know Nothing's Wrong', 2008
MARK MELVIN
Born 1979 in Bury, UK, MA University of The Arts London - Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design London, UK, 2007
Mark Melvin won the Nationwide Mercury Art Prize in 2007, chosen by judges Tim Marlow and Sir Peter Blake. He was one of four finalists of the 2007 New Sensations competition launched by the Saatchi Gallery and Channel 4. A 3-minute wonder documentary on Melvin's work was shown on Channel 4 in October 2007. The work he exhibited in New Sensations was acquired by the Zablodowicz Collection. This year he had a solo exhibition at Sassoon Gallery, London, and his work featured in a group show at Paraplufabriek in the Netherlands. His work was chosen by Peter Saville to be in an exhibition entitled Spin - the art of record design in London in September 2008.
Melvin's work is often cross-disciplinary and site-specific, and he has a longstanding collaborative partnership with his brother, composer Adam Melvin. His work experiments with various cycles and levels of repetition, be it a discussion of the habitual and routine, investigations into recollection and memory or appropriation from popular culture. These loops and repetitions are always fractured by a series of interruptions and re-workings, so that, although his pieces are often cycles of appropriated songs, films, words or signs in their entirety, a linear understanding or harmony is always broken.
Sam Zealey, 'Oak on Oak', 2008
SAM ZEALEY
Born in 1986. Graduated from Wimbledon School of Art, London, in 2008 (BA Hons).
'My interests lie very much within the sciences, and the first part of my higher educational life I studied physics, chemistry and biology, thinking that I would end up within the scientific community. As my understandings grew within the human philosophies of the world I started to make unusual connections between the physical world and the visual world that would be looked upon as degenerate in the sciences but in terms of sculpture articulated formal questions. I like to use household and industrial aggregates to create strange scenarios that otherwise would not be put into perspective. I also like to explore avenues where concept and metaphor are key to understanding the sculptures. People can often associate and have personal links with my sculpture because of the popular use of some of the objects I use, sometimes creating a humorous element when viewing the work.'
Saatchi Online Artists exhibition
2-19 October
The Gallery
Beach Blanket Babylon
19 - 23 Bethnal Green Road
London, E16JU
www.concreteandglass.co.uk
With thanks to the sponsors of the exhibition Estrella for providing beer for the private view on Thursday 2 October.
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