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As part of our continuing efforts to promote 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 in October. This follows our huge success in promoting and selling the work of Saatchi Online artists at the Zoo Art Fair in London in October 2007, at FORM London in February 2008, at PULSE New York in March 2008, and at SCOPE Basel 2008 in June 2008.
The Saatchi Online artists invited to exhibit their work at SCOPE London were all UK-based and were chosen from our weekly Saatchi Online Magazine Critic's Choice and Top 10s. We promoted and sold their work at the fair on a non-commission basis; all money from sales went directly to the artists. Below are some images and information on some of the artists who exhibited on the Saatchi Online stand at the fair:
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.
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.'
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.
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.'
Mark Harris, 'Northern Gate', from Continuous Defense series, 2008
Acrylic on Reproduction, 26 x 19cm
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.'
Rebecca Ayre, 'Tea', 2008
colour composite print, 45 x 55.5 framed
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.'
Michael Atkinson, 'Kent & Essex: Capriccio or Veduta', 2008
oil on silk cotton mix, 180 x 150cm
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.'
Damien Flood, 'Unknown I', 2008
oil on canvas, 40 x 30
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.'
Aaron Schuman, 'McQueen', 2008
18 x 14 inches, framed
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.'
Poppy Jones, 'Untitled', 2008
monoprint with painting, unique
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.'
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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