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Anne Songhurst's luscious oil-on-board still lives are beautiful homages to genuine maturity. Songhurst is one of a few self-taught artists whose work clearly benefited from being untouched by art school training, in which contemporary art schools tend to teach artists how to think rather than how to paint. Songhurst's lovely, lush images carry within themselves and beautifully present all the connotations associated with the still-life tradition that she follows.
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Our Berlin correspondent Ana Finel Honigman gives her tips for the exhibitions not to be missed in Berlin this autumn, including solo shows by Steffi Weigel (below), Ceal Floyer, Kirstine Roepstorff, Harald Hauswald and John Baldessari.

The winner of the August Saatchi Online Studio competition is Barry Selby. Saatchi Online's Berlin correspondent, Ana Finel Honigman, comments: 'The 50th anniversary of Nasa has brought renewed marvel at our ability to visit the moon. But space still remains a glorious mystery. Dorset-born artist Barry Selby's simple and stunning "Far, far away" vision of a glowing star is an inspiring reminder that the universe remains a source of wonder.'
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The winner of the July Saatchi Online Studio competition is Justine Shanti, chosen by Saatchi Online's China correspondent, Chris Moore. We will announce the winner of August's Saatchi Online Studio competition on Friday 28 August. The Saatchi Gallery will then donate £500 to a children's hospital around the world chosen by the winner. ... read more...

The artist Dash Snow's death at age 27 from a drug overdose has sparked a firestorm of schadenfreude, snide criticism and bile from bloggers and genuine uncompromised grief from the people who knew him. Here, some of Snow's friends have assembled material in the hope that describing their own feelings and pain over the loss of a warm, bright and beautiful young artist, father and inspiring figure will serve as a counterpoint to comments made by people who never knew Snow and tragically never wil... read more...

The woodland creatures in Anne Van As's paintings emanate gentle beauty and subtle grace, much like the paintings themselves. Van As uses a slim range of colours in her oil canvases but she achieves compelling shades of meaning and emotion. The deer, rabbits, squirrel and wolf she paints dominate her canvases like giants, yet they still appear vulnerable because of their meek expressions and soft bodies. ... read more...

Bruce la Bruce is a legend in the satellite genres of gay porn, art, gonzo journalism, independent cinema, punk and academia. Here we have coffee a few blocks from the Berlin branch of the Peres Projects gallery to discuss the untitled zombie hardcore porn flick that BlaB is showing at Peres Projects LA until 2 June.

For many of us today, avocado, nut brown and harvest gold shag rugs have come to signify the 1970s. Years from now, future generations will recognize a room with a hunter's trophy and antlers as a hipster signature of the early 2000s. What does this really say about our own era? Artist Joshua Levine offers one possible answer. His mixed media sculptures take an ironic swipe at urbanites who decorate their walls with replicas of dead animals, or the parts of the actual animals themselves, and al... read more...

Solo shows by Evol (below) and Ariel Reichman deal with issues of occupancy; Gilbert and George have their first show in Berlin for over a decade; three artists - Annette Kelm, Sergej Jensen and Wolfgang Breuer - take over the Kunst Werke; Any Sillman shows new paintings; and Peres Projects presents a summer show of gallery artists.
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Clayton James Cubitt creates arrestingly complex art juxtaposing extremes of purity and filth. The New Orleans-born and New York-based photographer cuts through superficial resolutions and contrived binary oppositions with his consistently crisp style.

The fashion models posing in front of historic paintings in Dickson Schneider's series of oil on canvases seem intended to express paradoxical relationships between art and fashion. Are they supposed to juxtapose the lasting significance of great art with the timeless distractions of chic, pretty young women? Click here to see more of Schneider's work registered on Saatchi Online. ... read more...

The winner of the April Saatchi Online Studio competition is Ollie O'Leary. Saatchi Online correspondent, Ana Finel Honigman, comments: 'Dublin-based O'Leary's figures are brightly coloured with soft shading and a light touch, yet they convey a sharp sense of emotional grey areas and hard dramatic concerns.' The Saatchi Gallery will donate £500 in the artist's name to a children's hospital of the winner's choice. The winner of May's Saatchi Online Studio competition will be announced on Friday ... read more...

The New York gallery Invisible Exports has launched a new Artist of the Month Club which offers members the chance to buy 12 original art works for $2400. Curators commissioning works for the AMC include Shamim Momin, a curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Gianni Jetzer, director of The Swiss Institute, artist, curator and director of White Columns Matthew Higgs, and freelance critic and curator Ana Finel Honigman who has invited Pinar Yolacan to create a new photographic work (below).... read more...

The winner of the March Saatchi Online Studio competition is 李奇安 from China. Saatchi Online correspondent, Catherine Taft, comments: "I was struck by the spontaneity of this work, and the way in which the artist has managed to create online a sense of fluidity, characteristic of traditional Chinese painting'. The Saatchi Gallery will donate £500 in the artist's name to a children's hospital of the winner's choice.
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Orly Genger's site-specific installation at the Indianapolis Museum of Art appears ominous and intimidating despite its springy softness. Hand-knitted from thousands of feet of nylon climbing rope, "Whole" is painted black and stacked into imposing towers. The rope's black coating heightens the installation's imposing presence and adds a level of association which R.C Basker summed up in a Village Voice review of a similar installation by Genger at the Larissa Goldston Gallery: "Genger crochets ... read more...

Much lauded and feted artists are nothing new to history. But the megawatt VIP "Art Star," whose antics and excesses helped to define the recent pre-recession era's idea of artistic success, is now (until the art market can support fun, folly and rock-star style fantasy) a thing of the past.

Pat Colella's subjects might be unknown to her viewers, but her pastel portraits present recognizable and appealing personalities. The fifty-eight year old Long Island-based artist explains her creative
ambitions as: "my art is a statement about creating three-dimensionality in a representational yet expressive way." To see more of her work registered on Saatchi Online click here. ... read more...

In the tradition of usually secular people who practice the rituals of their faiths' high holy days, many apolitical Americans became avid, almost obsessive news junkies during Barack Obama's race to the White House. Along with highlighting Americans' fundamental desire to experience hope, purpose and faith in their political process, the just-past election raised profound questions about what it means to be a politically responsible citizen. Shortly after the election American artists Bradford ... read more...

Fran Recacha's crisp Symbolist paintings would be captivating jacket art for authors ranging from Ayn Rand to Paul Auster or even Ian McEwan. The Barcelona-based artist creates gracefully molded figures engaged in dream-like scenarios open to expansive narrative interpretations and poetic depths. To see more of his work registered on Saatchi Online click here. ... read more...

For anyone needing to be reminded of art stardom at the apex of its assholeness, Brooklyn-based William Powhida is happy to provide a demonstration. As a spitfire art critic for the Brooklyn Rail, Powhida eloquently articulates his gripes, but in his own work he shows instead of tells. Over the past heady hedonistic years, Powhida masterfully crafted a fully formed douche-bag fame-sucking "art star" performance persona straight out of Bret Easton Ellis's oeuvre. Here, in the spirit of Easton Ell... read more...

Relentlessly satirising pop stars and movie icons, Mellor's riotous, irreverent and often obscene images subvert the accepted purity of the stars' invented or imagined personae, revealing the dark underside of the cult of celebrity as it is transformed by the forces of individual desire. In her first museum show in Switzerland she is showing a series of 120 portraits called 'Vile Affections' which she discusses in an interview with Ana Finel Honigman on Saatchi Online's magazine - click here to... read more...

The winner of the December Saatchi Online Studio competition is Pedro Uribe Echeverria from Paris. Saatchi Online correspondent, Ana Finel Honigman, comments: "Following the rules of old-fashion seduction, Pedro Uribe Echeverria leaves much to the imagination. Yet his velvety figures still appear like characters from classic film stills. Two women he draws could pass as Simone Signoret and Véra Clouzot from 'Les Diabolique'. With his cutting edge tools and loose lines, Uribe Echeverria evokes t... read more...

Regular Saatchi Online magazine contributor Ana Finel Honigman chooses just one show - Dan Attoe at Peres Projects, Berlin; while Time Out London's visual arts editor Ossian Ward's favourite shows of the year include Loris Greaud at the Grand Palais, Paris, Robin Rhode at the Hayward, London and Peter Doig at Tate Britain, London (below).

Jordan Tull's sleek, seductively sinister sculptures have no obvious function. Yet they imply a range of possible purposes. Subtle and stylish, Tull leaves the onus on viewers to make their own private assumptions and associations. To see more of Tull's work click here.

In March 2009 Saatchi Online will be showing and selling the work of a selection of artists from the Middle East registered on Saatchi Online at the Al Bastakiya Art Fair, the leading satellite art fair to Art Dubai. The fair will be hosted in 18 houses in Bastakia, Dubai's oldest standing district, and Saatchi Online will have one house to exhibit the work of Saatchi Online artists. Their work will be promoted and sold at the fair on a non-commission basis; all money from sales will go directl... read more...

The winner of the November Saatchi Online Studio competition is Laurence Groux from New York. Bill Roberts, Saatchi Online contributor, comments: 'Laurence Groux's untitled sketch of bird forms emerging from a tangle of black lines has a decorative, improvisatory charm, as if Picasso or Miró had somehow got hold of a PC one afternoon.' The Saatchi Gallery will donate £500 in the artist's name to a children's hospital of his choice. Artists can now create works for the December Saatchi Online S... read more...

Sara Rahbar confronts raw political concerns and cultural realities in her photography, video and striking textile sculptures that affect much of the world yet are rarely addressed by contemporary American artists. As an Iranian-American woman artist, it would be difficult for Rahbar's work to be viewed in a political vacuum even if she chose to be apolitical herself. But few artists with her background and ability are creating work that grapples more directly and confidently with Middle Easter... read more...

Frederic D first came to the attention of the Berlin gallery Nice and Fit (where his show is on until 20 December) through the artist's film 'Miss Baghdad', a critique of the consuming vapidity of high-gloss marketing which at the same time owes its own seduction to those very techniques (to watch a trailer for the film click here). In between making music videos Detjens was also creating photographic works, one of which was shown at PREVIEW Berlin and described by Berlin's Tagesspiegel as 'the... read more...

Mumbai-based Riyas Komu shows a series of enormous carved wooden skulls on which look like an ominous army of death warriors (below); Polish painter Przemyslaw Matecki debuts in Berlin with a compelling concoction of magazine collage; through a combination of drawings and cartoon-like oil paintings Bjarne Melgaard tells the troubling erotic misadventures of a young male prostitute; Iona Rozeal Brown creates paintings on panel and paper that combine the style of ukiyo-e woodblock prints with cont... read more...

Sales may have been slow and visitor numbers down but this year's ArtForum Berlin proved to be a functioning selling ground and a possible role model for other fairs nervous about surviving the coming crunch.

"Now this is work," grumbled one top New York gallerist at the opening of the Frieze art fair. "I now have to listen to collectors who had twenty million complain that they only have five million." Overall, the sales results at Frieze were not as dire as most feared, but whether or not money was passing hands at most of the booths, anxiety over money seemed to be the prime topic discussed by the hordes passing kisses and quick conversation during the VIP opening night. Even the gold silk Rubin C... read more...

As my mother would say: Morwenna Catt is "not a happy bunny." Nor are the embroidered cloth rabbit sculptures she makes in order to 'take recognizable artefacts and tales from childhood and subvert them into something malformed, battered and bruised; to evoke that darker side of childhood experience.' To see more of her work registered on Saatchi Online click here. ... read more...

The Chapman Brothers irreverently painted googley-eyed monsters on Goya's "Disasters of War" etchings; Duchamp butched up the Mona Lisa with a mustache; and Yasumasa Morimura bent the gender of art history's greatest beauties. In contrast to these artistic interlopers who appropriated art history in order to undermine its icons, Oxford-based artist Sam Branton's sassy insertion of his own signature characters into history's archives of decadent art would surely have enthralled and likely aroused... read more...

Good optical illusions, like those created by Devorah Sperber, create visual distortions which clarify the experience of seeing. For an ongoing series of works, Sperber recreates art-historical and pop-culture masterpieces using spools of thread. A deceptively random arrangement of 875 austere-colored spools of tread reveals itself to be a startling facsimile of the 'Mona Lisa' when viewed through a small sphere designed to replicate the workings of the human eye. Hung upside down, the threads o... read more...

Artists are often stereotyped as brooding misanthropes who equate anti-social behaviour with originality and integrity. And while being an artist can be lonely, art scenes are often perceived as cliquish and closed off to anyone but the initiated. But London-based twenty-six year old artist Matthew Stone is a real-deal artist of the highest order who creates art that is unique, challenging, wondrous and exciting because it is open and inclusive. With his salons and group projects, Stone undertak... read more...

The shine and purr of gushing international press emerging from Dubai can muffle the questionable quality of some of the region's art. But shift through the region's glittering offerings and there are some genuine treasures, including Hilda Hiary, Nadine Kanso, Hayv Kahraman, Laleh Khorramian (below) and Youssef Nabil.

Samantha Keely Smith's paintings are radiant with pulsating fiery potency. Yet they present a disquieting chilly vision of a world that is no longer welcoming for humans. The New York-based artist's magnificent
semi-abstract landscapes keep to a strictly limited palette of predominantly complementary colors. Its compelling contrasts nonetheless create a sense of total harmony which captures our imagination by
creating the arresting aura of a world full and fulfilled without the presence of any e... read more...

Today, the virtues of veracity and creative uses of the truth are heatedly debated. And while many artists apply those concepts to dissecting America's identity, few of them address that subject with the genuine empathy, integrity and awareness of moral ambiguity that Dan Attoe demonstrates in his paintings, drawings and neon sculptures.

In recent shows at London's Paradise Row and Dubai's The Third Line gallery, London-born and -based artist Shezad Dawood has swung a lasso around legendary Wild West iconography and pulled the image of the cowboy into the present day and our contemporary conflicts. In "If I should fall from grace with God," his first major London solo show, Dawood combined neon signs incorporating the Koran's concept of the "99 Names of God" with tumbleweeds, a symbol of the American Wild West. Around the glowin... read more...

For her show at London's Victoria Miro gallery, up through August 2nd, Chantal Joffe presents a body of work painted from life. Invited behind the scenes at Paris Fashion Week, Joffe has updated Degas, who painted ballerinas as they prepped backstage at the Royal Ballet. While Degas was interested in depicting the dancers' stretching and preparing, Joffe captures glimpses of the girls as they are made ready for the runway. The 22 oil on canvas, board or cardboard magazine-sized paintings that Jo... read more...

The winner of the July Your Studio competition is Larissa Evanova. Ana Finel Honigman, Saatchi Online Magazine regular correspondent, comments: 'The Venus de Willendorf solidified Pre-historic passion for fleshy, fertile and well-fed women in stone, but Dijon-based Larissa's plump, pretty and pink Venuses are more seductively rendered in soft pastel pixels. These luscious-looking ladies might not have fashionable frames, but Larissa convincingly depicts the primordial power of their rich contour... read more...

Joanne Klein's palette is light and bright, but her forms are dense, solid and serious. At fifty-four, the New Jersey-born NYU graduate lives in rural upstate New York after years in Manhattan. Her work reflects
both environments - large-scale abstract oil paintings which have a crisp formal structure appearance than alludes to urban architecture with a palette that includes grassy greens, pumpkin orange, melon yellow and other rich, earthy, organic hues. To see more of her work registered in Sa... read more...

The winner of the June Your Studio competition is Moti Sagron from Tel Aviv, Israel. The Los Angeles-based critic Catherine Taft writes about the winning work (below): 'This image is intensely abstract yet suggestively figurative in its careful balance between line and form; the basic outline of a body, seen from behind, emerges from fragmented lines and bold streaks of fleshy color. The figure's gender, features and visage remain compelling mysteries.' The Saatchi Gallery will donate £500 in t... read more...

In his art, Jay Batlle often references sophisticated New York City urbanite sources such as The New Yorker, the New York Times and the restaurant and foodie culture enjoyed by these publications' high-end readers. He has also created an extensive series of dog tags and surf boards adorned with 24k gold-plated handcuffs and cut-up credit cards to represent the debt incurred by living beyond one's means in a city like New York. But his work is less about the argot of an urban elite than it is an ... read more...

Although notably fewer American collectors were seen walking around the booths at Art Basel this year, the state of the United States was a theme that ran through Art Unlimited and Art Statements. The sixty artists from twenty-three countries presented in the 20,000 square foot space devoted to Unlimited and the solo shows run by thirty galleries in Statements grappled with a broad range of subjects and mediums. But examining and sometimes taunting America for its new role as a fading beacon on ... read more...

The funny thing about love is that lovers and parents think their beloved is extraordinary. Others might not realize the unique superiority of the person, but the one who loves them believes that their amazing attributes are beyond dispute. But Los Angeles-based artist Kristen S. Wilkins's humorous and insightful photographs playfully mock this misconception. By erasing sitters' facial features from found cameo portraits, Wilkins makes clear that our 'lovable' qualities are often properly seen o... read more...

Consider: After energy production, livestock is the second highest contributor to atmosphere-altering gases; four pounds of grain are needed to produce one pound of meat; only three years ago Americans were eating, on average, 30.4 kg of beef annually per person and were also weighing in with an obesity rate at almost 30% among children; and market reports tell us that beef consumption in England is at its highest since the seventies, making 'fat cow' an appropriately common English-ism. It is t... read more...

Nigel Cooke paints as if Clara Peeters or Ambrosius Bosschaert the Elder had devoted themselves to depicting the backs of busted-up buildings. Manchester-born Cooke, who received an MA from the Royal College of Art and a PhD from Goldsmith's, depicts graffiti flowers (along with birds, sunsets and disembodied brains) drinking and smoking like hooligans. Yet while the flowers are not acting pretty, the paintings are gorgeous; and just as the graffiti inject beauty into his imaginary scenes, Cooke... read more...

Decay, mess and chaos are everywhere in the scenes Anne Hardy presents in her crisp yet uncanny imagery. At first glance, the unoccupied rooms that she photographs appear neglected but normal. In the spaces Hardy shows us, there are usually signs of rough repairs, but the furniture and settings simply appear beaten down and worn out by excessive, careless use. But in actuality, none of those objects have been manhandled or clumsily placed. In fact, no one but Hardy herself is responsible for the... read more...

As the early creations of a pre-eminent critical figure in today's American art scene, the paintings that originally earned Artnet Editor Walter Robinson's place in the Manhattan art world of the 1980s are guaranteed to be of great interest. His "80's paintings" show at Chelsea's Metro Pictures (which also represents Cindy Sherman, Tony Oursler and Mike Kelley) is the first time that his "Romance Paintings" have been on view since the series was shown at Metro Pictures in the 1980s. ... read more...