Congratulations to all the artists who exhibited their work on the Saatchi Online stand at the Scope art fair in London and at the Saatchi Online exhibition which was part of the Concrete and Glass festival. The response to the work shown on the stand at Scope was positive with visitors saying they thought the work by Saatchi Online artists were the best at the fair. We also received a terrific response to the Saatchi Online exhibition which was part of a new art and music festival in London called Concrete and Glass which took place in London from 2-19 October. Over 400 people attended the opening night at the exhibition, with stars such as Russell Brand making an appearance.
Special congratulations to those artists who sold work at Scope and at Concrete and Glass or have been invited to be in future exhibitions: G L Brierley, Poppy Jones, Gabriele Beveridge, Matthew Atkinson, Philip Caramazza, Maurizio Anzeri, Whitney McVeigh, Federico Gallo, Mark Harris, Toby Christian, Nick Goss and Sam Zealey.
We are working on future opportunities for Saatchi Online artists and will be announcing these on the Saatchi Online Magazine.
The artists who exhibited at Scope London were:
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GL Brierley, 'New Seeker', 2008 |
G L BRIERLEY graduated with an MFA from Goldsmiths, London, in 2007. In 2008 she was chosen to be in ARTFUTURES at Bloomberg Space, London, and her work was included in a group show at the Louise T Blouin Foundation, London earlier this year. She will have a solo show at Natalia Goldin Gallery in Stockholm this autumn.
These paintings evolve through an attempt to balance themes such as the organic/synthetic, familiar/unfamiliar, uncanny/mock-gothic as well as control/chaos, dark/light, nostalgia/sci-fi to eventually create a hybridised space. The inherent quality of the oil is poured & allowed to flow, alchemically marbling on the gesso until eventually there is an illusional quality of a space beyond the surface. Painterly accidents or cultural elements are sometimes digitally sampled and like a technological malfunction made to recur to suggest themes of infinity and the Sublime.
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Petros Chrisostomou, 'Bananadosh', 2006 |
PETROS CHRISOSTOMOU graduated from the Royal Academy Schools' postgraduate programmed in 2008. He has already had two solo shows with Galerie Xippas in Paris and Athens. His work was included in Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2004/2005, and was on view at the UK Pavilion in Beijing to coincide with the Olympics. His work is part of a group show at this year's Liverpool Biennial, and in November he and fellow Royal Academy artist Alexander Hoda will be having a joint exhibition in London.
'My work is about extremes. Works like 'Bananadosh' and 'Hero' from the 18 Fortis Green series (an interpretation of my childhood home from memory) stand as totems to the romantic ideas of hope and aspiration, yet maintain a sense of grounding in various different, obvious and less obvious ways.'
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Toby Christian, 'Buoy', 2008 Painted bronze |
TOBY CHRISTIAN graduated with a BA (Hons) from Wimbledon College of Art, London, in 2007. He was shortlisted for the 2007 New Sensations prize run by the Saatchi Gallery and Channel 4, and his work was selected to be in ARTFUTURES in 2007. In 2008 he won the inaugural Noble Sculpture Prize and was chosen to create a new commission for the exhibition 'Heart of Glass' at Shoreditch Town Hall, London (until 19 October).
Toby Christian's work is concerned with putting ideas on a stage, and the problems that causes. Works can be mildly comical at first glance, but are clearly underpinned with a more lasting poeticism. Christian's marble 'Appendages' series sees the artist creating snapped-off fingers, noses, and ears; his attempt to unmake unmade sculptures. Other works, such as the painted bronze 'Hollow Torch' and 'Buoy' show a resonance between the materials he uses and the objects he creates, a trait prevalent throughout his practice. Other site-specific interventions see gallery walls pinched, pulled and tucked in, his idiosyncratic way of paying testament to the places that house art.
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Pio Abad, 'War Child', 2006 |
PIO ABAD was born in Manila in the Philippines in 1983, and graduated from the Glasgow School of Art in 2007 (BA Hons, First). Recent exhibitions include The Golden Record, Collective Gallery; Autarchy, Studio Warehouse Gallery, Patterna, Vegas Gallery; ARTFUTURES, Bloomberg Space, London, Here Lies Love, Market Gallery, and Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2008, A Foundation, Liverpool (then touring to Rochelle School, London). He is slated to have a drawings show at the Talbot Rice Gallery in Edinburgh in 2009.
'My work begins with a belief in the failed narrative, the persistent failure of history, the inevitability of dystopia. I am interested in the absurd systems of meaning generated by the relationship between excess and collapse: the calculated hegemony of totalitarian aesthetics, episodes of regimented debauchery in the writings of de Sade, the uneasy marriage of the modernist and the rococo in Imelda Marcos's disco-infused cultural movement. My work proceeds from that instance when vision becomes delusion, when the tyrant turns into a vandal.'
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Mark Harris, 'Northern Gate', |
MARK HARRIS has an MA in Fine Art from the Royal College of Art, London. Recent exhibitions include the Jerwood Drawing Prize, Space Gallery's 40th anniversary show, and 'World Gone Mad', a touring exhibition on surrealism in British contemporary art. His work is in the Deutsche Bank Collection and the permanent collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum.
'My current work has been concerned with ideas of defense and offense and their possible readings. The most recent pieces, a group titled A Continuous Defense, are a series of small collages and paintings on found images that depict landscapes and seascapes crossed by architectural structures. The images, although small in size, are epic in subject, suggesting possible visions of the future or alternative histories. As most of my work starts from the found image I am interested by the journey of a picture, from the unique to the multiple, ie the painting that is photographed, then reproduced within a book, made into a mass multiple and then over time ends up a lone book in a charity shop, which I find, react to and return it to the unique again.'
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Rebecca Ayre, 'Tea', 2008 |
REBECCA AYRE was born in 1985 in the UK and graduated in 2007 with a BA (Hons) Photography from Nottingham Trent University. Her work was chosen to be in 'Fresh Faced and Wild Eyed', a selection of the most promising recent graduates working with photography, which was at The Photographers Gallery, London in 2008.
'Explained as an unappeased longing to return, nostalgia has evolved over many years from being a treatable disease, common in soldiers when they were far afield, to a metaphysical condition. For these soldiers, a return home was seen as a cure for the erroneous representations and "a loss of touch with the present." Today, we can return to what makes us nostalgic by retreating into our photograph albums, due to photography's ability to present to us the past, so vividly, in the present.
A modern nostalgia is concerned with past sensations and experiences. The photographs we keep often borrow a general aesthetic from existing pictures, paintings and postcards. The obvious similarities in appearance, and the common rituals surrounding family photography, are testament to what we need emotionally from them. My pictures are a confirmation of everyone's and no one's memories; a collective nostalgia.'
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Michael Atkinson, 'Kent & Essex: Capriccio or Veduta', 2008 |
MATTHEW ATKINSON graduated from Loughborough University in 2007 with a BA in Fine Art Painting (First Class). He was shortlisted for the Mercury Art Prize and Celeste Art Prize in 2007, and currently has a residency at the Florence Arts Trust in London.
'As a subject for my paintings I choose particular places that throughout time gradually lose their purpose and identity, becoming strange inhabitable lands. They are abandoned remnants that can be better described as hinterlands that slip from our daily conscious. Expendable and worthless, they are at once everywhere and nowhere. I perceive such places to possess otherworldly beauty rather than being classically beautiful. This then presents the opportunity to question ideas about beauty utilising traditional philosophical idioms in a bid to challenge perception and understanding. My aim is to capture the intimate appreciation of the transience of these palces, rescuing them for eternity, while challenging assumptions and providing an alternative experience to people's norm.'
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Damien Flood, 'Unknown I', 2008 |
DAMIEN FLOOD was born in 1979 in Bray, Co. Wicklow, Ireland. He studied at Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art Design and Technology Co. Dublin 1999-2003 and the National College of Art and Design Dublin 2006 to 2008. He was awarded the National University of Ireland Purchase Award for his MFA graduate show and was most recently selected for the John Moores 25 Contemporary Painting Prize 2008 in Liverpool. Group shows include MFA Graduate Show, Digital Hub, Dublin, 2008, 'About 100 Experiments' Birr, Co. Offaly 2008, Big Store Temple Bar Galleries Dublin 2007.
'My work situates itself between fact and fiction. The paintings I create are modern landscapes that reference the history of painting with an underlying fantastical element. A fleeting familiarity can be found in the work that is soon replaced by an ambiguous questioning. I use imagery gathered from many and varied sources. One of the underpinning sources is the voyage of the H.M.S Challenger, a research trip that explored the oceans in the 19th century. The illustrations gathered on these voyages have a brilliant otherworldly feel; although they are of actual plants and creatures they contain a mystery and scepticism. It is this notion of the undiscovered, the other, the foreign landscape that I am searching for within my own work.'
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Aaron Schuman, 'McQueen', 2008 |
AARON SCHUMAN is an American photographer, editor and writer based in the UK. He received a B.F.A. in Photography and History of Art from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts in 1999, and an M.A. in Humanities and Cultural Studies, from the University of London's London Consortium in 2003. Having assisted various photographers - most notably, Annie Leibovitz and Wolfgang Tillmans - he began to pursue his own career in 2000. He has exhibited his photographic work internationally and is the founder and editor of the online photography journal, SeeSaw Magazine (www.seesawmagazine.com).
'These photographs were made on the eroding sets and locations of Sergio Leone's celebrated 1960s spaghetti Westerns, deep in the Almerian deserts of southern Spain. For several years I have pursued work concerned with the propagation of American myths abroad, as well as notions of how the "American vision" has been applied to landscapes and cultures throughout the world. Recently, I became fascinated by the notion that a fundamental American archetype - the Wild West, and its associations with freedom, rebelliousness, brutality, morality, honour and so on - had been transposed by an Italian film director onto the landscape of Franco's Spain, and subsequently came to define this quintessentially American genre in itself. Furthermore, I was particularly interested in trying to discover what these sets - flimsy, worn and weathered, but still standing forty years on - might insinuate about the state of America, its ideals, reputation, ambitions, visions and illusions today.'
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Poppy Jones, 'Untitled', 2008 |
POPPY JONES was born 1985 in London and is currently studying for an MA at the Royal College of Art, London. She has shown her work in several group exhibitions, including the Clifford Chance Group Print Show, and in 2007 won the Lynn Painter Stainers Young Artists Award.
'I'm interested in how the digital image blurs the distinctions between painting and photography, the mechanical and the handmade. I use scale, colour, content, and form to confuse the credibility of the images I make. I mix slow traditional print processes, such as etching, with the quicker mark-making of mono-printing, to indicate different qualities of time. I use the real scratches on the metal printing plate to indicate a real window; the scratches in both cases are the real traces of chance and time. Antonioni's "Zabriskie Point" inspired me to visit the American desert. I spent two months in California making drawings and collecting material, and these images appear in my new prints. Through my working methods and the nature of the images I create, I hope to make the viewer question what it is they are seeing, and instil a sense of mystery.'
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Gabriele Beveridge, 'Untitled', 2008 |
GABRIELE BEVERIDGE was born in Hong Kong in 1985 and graduated from University College Falmouth, 2007 with a BA (Hons) Photography (First Class). She is currently studying for an MA at the Slade School of Art, London. Her work was exhibited in 'Through the Lens', Royal West of England Academy this year, and in 'Platestopixels, International Juried Exhibition, Oregon, US, in 2007.
'I am always searching for new images by transforming the original identity of what appeals to me, in an attempt to establish a connection with nature and the phenomena of life that transcends mere existence. Providing mystery and ambiguity to generate a stepping-stone for the viewer's imagination is at the heart of my work. Discarding any conventional assumptions about the formal qualities of photography, my ideas explore the nature of the photograph itself, in a hope to provide places in which the invisible, the ineffable, the unknown, are allowed to present themselves - representations that express an altered state of vision such as in a dream.'
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Philip Caramazza, 'After Durer and Fabritius, |
PHILIP CARAMAZZA has an MA in Fine Art from the Royal College of Art, London (2008). In 2006 he graduated from Byam Shaw School of Art, London with a Postgraduate Diploma in Fine Art: Painting. He has shown his work in several groups shows in London, most recently in 'Anticipation', an exhibition of London's best emerging artists, at Selfridges (July 2008).
'In regard to issues of style, under the weight or baggage of painterly traditions and conventions, this series of paintings takes up a posture to painting and appropriation and to questions centred around the unstable, transmutational nature of language itself. The paintings raise a dialogue between an idealised notion rooted in nostalgia, and assumed to be recoverable and static, and a more creative notion that the representation of the past is in fact something new. It is not always clear what is at stake in these paintings - is it a case of irony, humour; a flight of fancy; a process of cultural exhaustion and/or despair becoming light again?'
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Vicky Wright, Crucifixion, 2008 |
VICKY WRIGHT has exhibited widely, including Whitechapel (2001), MOT London (2003), IBID Projects, London (2005) and Engholm Engelhorn, Vienna (2007). She won the NPG BP Award 2003 and Jerwood Prize 2007, and was shortlisted for Whitechapel / Max Mara Womens' Art Prize (2008). She will be showing new works at the M.O.T gallery in London in November, and her work will feature in large survey of contemporary painting at the Josh Lilley Gallery in London in January 2009.
'My work is coloured by my own experience, and that of my family who were heavily involved in the coal-mining tradition of North West England and its eventual politically engineered demise, which I witnessed through my early adulthood. My grandmother was a very strong influence on my life and art. Her tales of working in this underworld continue to fill me with a fascination and awe: the inhumane conditions, the sulphurous air, the heavy machinery. Many of my works take the shape of abject bodies or, as Mikhail Bahktin puts it in his writings on the French poet Rabelais, "body grotesques". My work explores the masking employed to disguise structures and routines imposed upon people by state regimes and other economic apparatus, a symbolic "body grotesque" or abject body which exists to critique society, to express life and death cycles, and remind us of our bodily connectivity to the world in which we live.'
The Saatchi Online artists in the exhibition at Concrete and Glass 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.'
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