DAILY MAGAZINE
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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.

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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.

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Rose Eken, in her construction of model worlds and video scenarios, unpicks the processes through which certain sites or pop-cultural objects have become embedded within the collective consciousness. The Danish-born, London-based artist's open appropriation of familiar imagery, whether of Elvis' grave or a period interior, acknowledges the inevitable disparity between one's memory and the physical reality of a given thing or place, but most importantly, the notion of authenticity as a corruptible facet of technological meditation.

Continue reading "ROSE EKEN: SAATCHI ONLINE CRITIC'S CHOICE BY REBECCA GELDARD" »

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Reminiscent of Ming and Yuan dynasty art, Joey Leung's work tells a pictorial story in a manner which falls somewhere between a modern cartoon strip and ancient Chinese scrolls. The scratchy fine drawings of fantastic fruit, animals and stick-like humans resemble the ancient pictographs from which today's Chinese calligraphy has evolved.

Continue reading "JOEY LEUNG KA YIN: SAATCHI ONLINE CRITIC'S CHOICE BY KATE EVANS" »

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Bojana Nikolic's medium is painting, her métier is exuberance, and her forte is a plastic fantastic land art. Of her own work, Nikolic writes: "A wall, the floor, a box, glass, a carpet, paper, a table, a chair, a pillow - all of these can become a painting. Does that not make all those claims that painting is dead nothing more but a neo-conservative wail?"

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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.

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Brunelli's majestic black and white portraits of animals take on an ordinary subject and turn it nothing short of haunting - a different way of looking at the everyday.

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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 his sources. To see more of his work registered on Saatchi Online click here.

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Sam Zealey was born in 1986 and graduated from Wimbledon School of Art, London, in 2008. After studying physics, chemistry and biology, Zealey started to make unusual connections between the physical world and the visual world which from a scientific perspective would be looked upon as 'degenerate' but in terms of sculpture articulate questions about the form itself.

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Since 1995, Norwegian sculptor Bjørn Bjarre's practice has consisted largely of an unfolding series of Plasticine works, collectively titled 'Abstract Feeling'. In this series, Bjarre subjects fragments of stylized, cartoon-like, mostly male body parts to a process of violent recomposition in a manner that seems to comment on the artist's role as a latter day Dr Frankenstein. To see more of his work registered on Saatchi Online click here.

Continue reading "BJORN BJARRE: SAATCHI ONLINE CRITIC'S CHOICE BY BILL ROBERTS" »

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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.

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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.

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Penpal, avatar, master, foil? David Hendrickx's relationship to the artist whose photographs serve as his source material is deeply unclear, the subject of his series entitled 'Appropriation'. The title is quietly wry as the project itself: Hendrickx's work reveals less how online practices have caused us to rethink our relationship to others' imagery, so much as blown it to simthereens.

Continue reading "DAVID HENDRICKX: SAATCHI ONLINE CRITIC'S CHOICE BY ALIX RULE" »

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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 extraneous life-forms.

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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 perception of the medium of photography itself. With their surrealist bent and playful distortion of scale, Chrisostomou's photographs allow the viewer, as he puts it, 'to speculate the real and the imaginary'.

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In her photographs of greenhouse interiors and other domesticated spaces, Icelandic artist Bára Kristinsdóttir captures the poetics of something that can serve as a metaphor of poetic evanescence itself. It is something that appears in much of her work, but quietly: water, in all of its temperature-based states, visible or invisible, never entirely present, never entirely gone. To see more of her work registered on Saatchi Online click here.

Continue reading "BARA KRISTINSDOTTIR: SAATCHI ONLINE CRITIC'S CHOICE BY LUPE NUNEZ-FERNANDEZ" »

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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.

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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 Saatchi Online click here.

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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 physical trace on the places he photographs.

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Timothy Hutchings' sculptural practice presents a novel intersection of pastiche Minimalist geometry with an interest in social and formal aspects of play and gaming, but warfare provides a sustained undercurrent to each of these concerns. To see more of Timothy Hutchings work registered on Saatchi Online click here.

Continue reading "TIMOTHY HUTCHINGS: SAATCHI ONLINE CRITIC'S CHOICE BY BILL ROBERTS" »

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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 psychological dimension to what might be 'the last portrait' of a person's life, creating an almost three-dimensional quality, as if to say 'Yes, you did indeed exist'.

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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 only through a powerful, specific, emotional lens.

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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.

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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 therefore no surprise that bovine beauty is an often overlooked subject matter for artists. But for the Belgium-born and Britain-based artist Thuline de Cock, cows are the subjects of her beautifully realistic and sensitive oil paintings. To see more of her work registered on Saatchi Online click here.

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Italian three-person collective Amae are into cosmetics - not adornment. Their interest is either cosmic or scientific. What happens when you paint with makeup? When Amae photograph makeup explosions, they do it gorgeously with commercial hermeticism. Their make languorous videos of goo pouring down flesh. To see more of their work registered on Saatchi Online click here.

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"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-finished and deconstructed imagery culled from an agitated sub-conscious. Several of her works will be on view at the Saatchi Online booth at Scope Basel this June, where it will be possible to buy the work of a selection of Saatchi Online artists.

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Bernhard Hildebrandt creates work at the centre of a conceptual duality between what is seen and what remains to be seen, between the static and streaming. In his Stereo series a painting and a photo of it, printed at an identical scale, are paired in diptych format. The viewer is caught stepping between the transient surface reflections playing out on polyurethane enamelled Plexiglas and the reflections captured in its alter-ego, the narcissistic photograph.

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As Russian-born and Paris-based artist Yury Toroptsov demonstrates in his work, the relics of fame carry as much magic as holy articles might to the faithful. But Toroptsov's work asks what fans are hoping to extract from their sensual engagement with a star's garments, or by their careful coping of their idol's appearance. Are these empty rituals of devotion or do fans have a larger spiritual aim when they look toward stars for inspiration? To see more of Yury Toroptsov's work registered on Saatchi Online click here.

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Volkan Diyaroglu is a young Turkish painter who was born in Istanbul on the 1st of May 1982 and currently resides in Valencia, Spain. In a recent interview he said: 'I simply paint on a canvas, on the floor and what you see from the outside as dripping, isn't really dripping, they are accidents that happen when I am over the canvas. The paint drips a lot while I put on a colour. The drips exist in my time and space, and since gravity also exists, they fall, and I accept them as they are. width="500" height="451" />

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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.

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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 in Amsterdam, 1967 and will be exhibiting one of his photographs at the Sony World Photography Awards in Cannes, 20-25 April. To visit de Visser's Saatchi Online profile page click here. To find out more about the SWPA and Saatchi Online's exhibition click here.

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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.

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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 exhibition at the FUEL Collection in Philadelphia in February 2009. He has two exhibitions on this Spring in Holland and will be showing work at ART AMSTERDAM in May.

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The most vividly accidental arrangement of artless objects that I've come across in recent times was in a half built house in Florida. The unfinished fixtures, the loose wiring, the litter of paint pots and the ditch cleared for a pool, all suggested a mood of labour and do-it-yourself potential that was very close to the interests of a lot of contemporary art. Joseph Giannasio's interventions in an older building summon a similar impression, but by heading in reverse - pulling up floorboards, resurrecting trash.

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Aleksandra Radonich's deeply saturated color photographs lead us on a complex journey through the people and places of her native Serbia. Familiar to the world through the mass media's lens focused on painful and perilous war events, Serbia and her people appear through the artist's eyes as proud and heroic protagonists of a contemporary fairytale, stoics bearing the scars of their history.

Continue reading "ALEKSANDRA RADONICH: SAATCHI ONLINE CRITIC'S CHOICE BY MICAELA GIOVANOTTI" »

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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.

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