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Congratulations to the 6 Saatchi Online artists in this exhibition at Michael Hoppen which closes has been extended until 17 October. Entitled 'Starting with a Photograph', the works in the show, many of which have been sold, all begin with a photographic image - found or made. Beyond that, each piece is unique, sharing only an interest in exploring and expanding the limits of photography.
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Dana Oldfather is a self-taught painter whose work was awarded 2nd place in the 2008 9th Annual National Young Painters Competition, selected by the New York painter and art critic Peter Plagens. "Throughout my career as an oil painter", she says, "I have maintained a feeling for the monumentality of the human form. I aim to reflect attitude, indifference and sometimes despair, through the recreation of the figure and abstraction as a collaborative expression." ... read more...

David Birkin's work is informed by the history of photography and its relationship to performance in contemporary art. By combining long exposure techniques with a conceptual methodology, his practice incorporates a specific performance into the image-making process and defines it within the parameters of that event.

Toby Christian's work probes into the taken-for-granted of art making and art display. Never departing from his sharp wit, Christian goes back to sculpture's fundamental issues: the relationship between matter and space, the link between material and intention, and the relevance of contemporary creation versus art history's overwhelming heritage.

Miquetta Ahuja describes her drawings and paintings as 'works of Automythography' in which she explores the symbolic significance of blackness and the social implications of Black hair. 'In response to the history of Black hair as a barometer of social and personal consciousness', she says, 'I make the image of hair both corporeal and conceptual, giving it psychic proportions.' To see more of her work registered on Saatchi Online click here.
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Whether taking photographs of architecture, interiors or the human form, Robynne Limoges's main interest is light. 'I am obsessed with light as metaphor,' she says, 'and with the philosophical equation of just how little light is necessary to dispel darkness.' Her series entitled 'Figure as Dream' was made by shooting into the reflective surface of a mirror or polished glass so that each photograph captures not what she is standing in front of but what is behind her. The emotional intensity in t... read more...

Yury Toroptsov was born in 1974 in a small rural community near Vladivostok, and left Russia in 1998 to study in New York. In 2003 Toroptsov, a consultant to the United Nations, decided to change his profession and follow his long-time passion - photography, which he now does from his home in Paris. His most recent series, "The House of Baba Yaga" (2008), shown at Paris Photo in 2008, was made when he revisited his family house in a small village in Far Eastern Russia, which brought alive childh... read more...

Ayad Alkadhi uses Arabic calligraphy and powerful figurative imagery to create narratives concerning the themes of religion, politics and culture. His recent paintings engage with the war in Iraq and the psychological, emotional and social ramifications for the Iraqi people. Works by Alkadhi are currently on view in an exhibition by Iraqi artists in exile at the Station Contemporary Art Museum in Houston until 1 February 2009. You can also see more of his work registered on Saatchi Online by c... read more...

Among the photography books published this year, not to be missed are Mikhail Subotzky's 'Beaufort West' (below), Dayanita Singh's refreshignly intimate 'Sent a Letter', Sarah Moon's 5-volume visual memoir, Miroslav Tichy's obsession with the female form, and Anders Petersen's unflinching series of pictures entitled 'French Kiss'.

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...

Sally Noall's series entitled 'Dorothy's Shoes' alludes to two films whose visual imagery have become deeply embedded in our collective psyche: Alfred Hitchcock's 'The Birds' and 'The Wizard of Oz' starring Judy Garland as Dorothy. She invites us to consider why certain images and objects take on particular significance in our lives, why there is a certain nostalgia imbued in these iconic cultural landmarks, and what 'our cultural objects' reveal about us, our identity, our memories and our year... read more...

One of the most electrifying speeches of Barack Obama's campaign was made in Berlin in July of this year, and among the 200,000 or more people who turned out to witness this historical moment was Saatchi Online artist Hans Groeger, whose large-scale painting, 'Way of Hope' (2008), features Obama's Berlin visit as well as other key moments in Germany and America's recent history from the dropping of the atom bomb in Hiroshima in 1945 to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. ... read more...

Mie Olise Kjærgaard, one of the finalists of last year's New Sensations competition, is currently showing new paintings at the Standpoint Gallery in London in a two-person exhibition with American artist Mary Mattingly. Kjærgaard creates what she calls 'porous constructions', abandoned structures reminiscent of cities or cargo ships, watchtowers, houses and sheds. ... read more...

Hannah Bureau makes paintings inspired by natural forms - starbursts, the milky way, the Aurora Borealis, geology, iceberg formations, crystal formations and crystal gardens - as well as patterns from 1950s and 60s textile design, fractal geometry in nature and computer-generated fractal images. Bureau, who describes her paintings as 'autobiographical accumulations of memory and nostalgia', graduated this September with an MFA in Painting from the Massachusetts College of Art. ... read more...

As part of our continuing efforts to promote the work of Saatchi Online artists, Saatchi Online presented a selection of UK-based artists registered on the site at this year's SCOPE art fair in London 16-19 October. All the works were available for sale on a non-commission basis (all money from sales went directly to the artists), and here you can view the work of the artists who exhibited on the Saatchi Online stand at the fair. ... read more...

The Sovereign European Art Prize has announced the 30 shortlisted artists for this year's prize, including two Saatchi Online artists, Maurizio Anzeri and Joss McKinley. The shortlisted works will be shown in an exhibition in London opening on 1 October at Somerset House. There will be two winners - one chosen by the judges who will receive 25,000 euros, and one selected by public vote who will receive 1000 euros. Here Saatchi Online's magazine editor Rebecca Wilson highlights the work of 10 of ... read more...

Gabriele Beveridge grew up in Hong Kong and graduated from University College Falmouth in 2007 with a First Class BA (Hons) degree in Photography. Discarding any conventional assumptions about the formal qualities of photography, Gabriele Beveridge's work explores the nature of the medium itself, in the hope of providing places in which the invisible, the ineffable and the unknown are allowed to present themselves. ... read more...

Abandoned buildings and ideas of beauty are the subject of Matthew Atkinson's paintings. What interests him is the way that over time these buildings have lost their original identity and become strange inhabitable lands, expendable and worthless. His work taps into a recent re-emergence of beauty in art which is not so much about the pursuit of beauty as a pursuit of the idea of beauty. To see more of Matthew Atkinson's work registered on Saatchi Online click here. ... read more...

Petros Chrisostomou, a recent graduate of the Royal Academy Schools in London, creates carefully constructed models of everyday environments into which he places unexpected elements - and then photographs them. A form of still life photography, Chrisostomou's works disrupt and subvert our conventional expectations of mundane objects, such as biros spanning the width of his childhood living room, and giant eggs bulging out of a replica of the artist's kitchen), as well as shaking up our percepti... read more...

Mike Hunter is a recent graduate of Edinburgh College of Art where he obtained a first class degree in photography. He shoots on large format negatives and uses a miniaturizing technique called 'tilt shift photography'. For his series of photographs entitled The Army Man project, he worked with a team of actors who he dressed up as toy soldiers and placed in real locations. ... read more...

Jesus Jimenez works in photography, video and installation, playfully exploring the world and his relation to it. His works are inspired by a personal obsession for order, the object and the trace it leaves behind. Whether he's adjusting the phones in a New York telephone booth into perfect symmetry, so that they are talking to one another, or moving two hand dryers so that they're blowing directly at each other, again in perfect symmetry, his works are witty and inventive, leaving their own phy... read more...

Maurizio Anzeri's obsession with found photographs taken from family albums began when he started visiting cemeteries in Italy and thinking about the headstones as the last trace of the dead, standing as if to say 'I existed'. Anzeri works with photographs of people and family groups that have been thrown away at the end of someone's life or deemed not worth hanging onto. His exquisite embroidered embellishments are a kind of celebration of these forgotten lives. He brings an intense psychologi... read more...

Teiji Hayama's paintings join together western and Japanese influences, combining different art historical periods with contemporary Japanese pop culture. Pale, ethereal figures with elongated, tinted eyes and long blond hair bring to mind Japanese Manga characters and the depiction of women in Christian art.

"We wear Cain's mark on our forehead. Atrocity has so become our companion we don't recognize it- even when it is standing right before us and unmasking itself.' Angelika J. Trojnarski was born in 1979 in Mragowo, Poland, and left in 2004 to study at the Academy of Fine Arts in Düsseldorf, first under Herbert Brandl and, before his death in 2007, Jörg Immendorff. Her paintings hark back to the advent of modernism with their subdued palette, painterly handling of oils and assemblage of semi-fin... read more...

HarperCollins and Saatchi Online are delighted to announce the winning design for the cover of the hardback edition of The Last Days of the Lacuna Cabal by Sean Dixon. Becca Thorne's striking cover (below) will be used on the finished book, published on 1 July. Click here to see the 20 shortlisted entries. ... read more...

George Igboegwu has no formal training in photography but his work stood out from the entries to the inaugural Sony World Photography Awards and will be shown on the Saatchi Online Wall in Cannes as part of the SWPA festivities later this month (22-26 April). To see more of George Igboegwu's work click here to go to his Saatchi Online profile page. ... read more...

Bart de Visser has made his artistic project the documentation of abandoned places and buildings in a process of decay. His interest in derelict places began as a child when instructions not to go to such places made them even more fascinating. He has since travelled all over the world photographing such buildings, trying to imagine what might have happened there in the past and attempting to capture something of the building's former life in its abandoned present state. Bart de Visser was born ... read more...

Marta Volkova was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, and since 1991 has been living and working in The Netherlands. A series of her paintings are on view until 12 April in an exhibition entitled 'Happy Endings' at Galerie Stevens in Maastricht.
Click here to find out more about Marta Volkova and her work registered on Saatchi Online. ... read more...

Since registering on Saatchi Online Jaap de Vries has been invited by several galleries to have shows. He now has two galleries in Holland representing him and has been taken on by the London gallery 20 Hoxton Square where he had a solo show in September 2007. His work has featured in German Vanity Fair in an article about the success of artists who work is for sale via the internet, and later this year he will be in a group show at Gallery Primo Alonso in London. He has also been offered a solo... read more...

Nidhi Jalan's work takes form through three-dimensional objects and installations. Jalan, who was born in Calcutta and has an MFA from Hunter College, New York, describes her work as 'an intermingling of past and present experiences' in which aesthetics and beauty lure the viewer into an experience which she hopes will encourage people to think about the fleeting pleasures of life. To see more of Nidhi Jalan's work on Saatchi Online click here. ... read more...

Jennifer Sanchez's paintings and works on paper are concerned with spatial relationships and the process itself of making a painting. Exquisite Milhazes-like curves, lines and circular patterns engage in a perpetually changing visual and spatial environment, which Sanchez hopes will invite the viewer to experience new and emergent spaces. 'What interests me most', she says, 'is the concept that space has no definitive existence yet it enables everything else to exist.' ... read more...

Poppy Jones graduated in 2007 Falmouth College of Arts in Cornwall with a BA (Hons) in Fine Art, and soon after went on to win the prestigious Lynn Painter-Stainers Young Artist Award. Jones makes monoprints which have an ethereal, ghostly quality that are deliberately hard to read - figures are caught in a blurry half-existence; places seem hinted at or imagined, depicted as if seen from behind glass or a filmy screen. ... read more...

A month before 9/11, the day Hugh Mendes graduated with an MA in Painting, he finished a painting of Bin Laden pointing a gun at a triumphant George Bush. Since this moment of uncanny foresight over six years ago, current affairs, newspaper clippings and obituaries have become Mendes' main source of inspiration.

Adam Faramawy, who was born in Dubai in 1981 and studied at The Slade School of Fine Art, describes his work as 'resolutely representational'. His videos display a fixation with fantasy and the fantastic, expressing ideas concerning what he calls 'transmissions of knowledge demonstrating fluid or floating identities'. His work brings together a wide range of ideas and interests from arabesque architecture, Sufi theology and ritual to psychedelia, grunge, YouTube and gothic. As he writes about hi... read more...

Will Corwin, who was born in New York in 1976, works with cast panels of plaster which he hangs, piles on the floor or leans against the wall to create what he describes as 'a surrogate surface'. Onto his plaster 'canvas', Corwin draws or paints creating pictures that also have a sculptural, architectural quality. 'The pictures are no longer merely paintings,' says Corwin, 'they become "things," objects that inhabit space within the room.' ... read more...

Zhang O was born in Guangzhou in 1976 and has since then lived both in London and New York. Living in different cities and experiencing different cultures informs much of her practice as an artist, particularly in her series 'Daddy & I' which pictures young Chinese girls with their adopted Western fathers.

Hong Kong-born, New York-based artist Annysa Ng addresses issues of femininity and female suppression in her exquisitely executed sculptural and wall-based works. After studying in Hong Kong and Germany Ng moved to New York to enroll at the School of Visual Arts, and her work reflects her observations of women in both Eastern and Western cultures.

Whether you like taking pictures or looking at them, Stephen Shore's new book The Nature of Photographs: A Primer provides anyone interested in photography with a way of understanding how the three-dimensional world gets translated into the flat plane of a photograph and how 'the visual grammar of photography' functions. Rebecca Wilson reports. ... read more...

Last week Hauser & Wirth in London opened an exhibition of a select number of works by the American artist Lee Lozano, who in the 1960s was a key figure in the New York arts scene. But by the early 70s she'd turned her back on the art world and on New York, stopped talking to women and her career as an artist was over. Almost 10 years after her death, Lozano is now being recognised as one of the most radical, intense and conceptually interesting artists of this period. Rebecca Wilson reports. ... read more...

Adam Latham, who graduated from London's Royal College of Art in 2005 with an MA in Painting, makes drawings and paintings which confront taboos and the limits of acceptable ideas of taste. His work, which has its roots in social and political cartooning, explores the role of exoticism in art, and the intricacy particularly of his drawings at first diverts one's gaze from their less than palatable subjects. ... read more...

Last year Oliver Clegg submitted work for the Royal Academy's annual Summer Exhibition and not only were two of his paintings accepted but they were hung alongside work by two YBA heavyweights, Sarah Lucas and Gary Hume. Since then Clegg, aged 27, has gathered a discerning and loyal following among collectors and is much in demand for exhibitions - he's in two group shows opening this week. Rebecca Wilson and Dafydd Jones visited Oliver Clegg in his studio to get a sneak preview of the works inc... read more...

In his first exhibition in the UK since 2000, the Dutch artist Aernout Mik is showing four films which investigate the representation of war and patterns of human behaviour. Mik uses unseen footage from the conflict in former Yugoslavia in an attempt, as he puts it, 'to readdress the balance between the event and the non-event'. To view a clip of Mik's film 'Scapegoat' scroll down to our new Video box.
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A round-up of the week's art news including Christie's acquisition of the London commercial gallery Haunch of Venison, a new director for DIA, another award for the critic Jerry Saltz, Banksy's art gets painted over by Network Rail, Emma Dexter leaves the Tate to become a director of exhibitions at Timothy Taylor Gallery in London, and MoMA in New York comes under scrutiny for staggering payments made to its director Glenn Lowry (below). ... read more...

The work of the four photographers shortlisted for this year's DeutscheBorse Photography Prize - Walid Raad, Fiona Tan, Philippe Chancel and Anders Petersen - went on view on Wednesday evening at The Photographers' Gallery in London. The winner will be announced on 21 March and the exhibition runs until 9 April. Rebecca Wilson reports.

Rebecca Wilson's round-up of shows to look out for this month including Lara Schnitger at Modern Art, Karen Kilimnik at the Serpentine, Gilbert & George at Tate Modern, a debut show for Latvian artist Sam Kaprielov at Riflemaker and Guy Richards Smit (below) at Fred.

The Gallery @ Adventure Ecology, in partnership with Your Gallery, opens tonight with a group show of international artists entitled 'Waste & The Natural World'. This exhibition, which will take place in London, showcases the work of four artists selected from the Your Gallery website who share Adventure Ecology's concerns about the environment. ... read more...

In January 1970 the American 'land' artist, Robert Smithson, created one of his celebrated earthworks, Partially Buried Woodshed, at Kent State University, Ohio. Four months later a demonstration against the Vietnam War took place at the university during which four students were killed by National Guardsmen. Since then Smithson's work has not only become an iconic work in the art historical canon but also a metaphor for the social and political climate of the time. Over three decades later Char... read more...

For the last 12 years Dutch artist Marcel van Eeden has been making a drawing a day based on an event that took place prior to the year of his birth, 1965. Exquisitely rendered, van Eeden's drawings in graphite pencil function as a kind of diary in absentia - as the artist explains, 'The first and most important thing that fascinates me is that I wasn't alive at the moment the picture was taken. Then I can see the moment, I can see the light that fell, and even though I didn't exist at the time,... read more...

Following on from its landmark publication Vitamin P, a highly acclaimed survey of contemporary painting edited by the critic Barry Schwabsky, Phaidon this month pulls off another triumph with Vitamin Ph, an equivalent examination of current trends in photography.