The Triumph of Painting

Subversion on canvas

Meredith Etherington-Smith, Sunday Telegraph

Meredith Etherington-Smith visits the Saatchi Gallery for an exclusive preview of the new 'Triumph of Painting' show.

The second part of The Triumph of Painting, Charles Saatchi's two-year series of shows devoted to his more recent acquisitions, opens this week at County Hall. For this tightly curated show, five of the six artists featured are German, one Polish; there are no British artists - they're being saved for later in the series.

Albert Oehlen is the oldest artist in the exhibition. Born in 1954 in Krefeld, he now works in Spain and describes his works as "post-non-representational". Oehlen's very large canvases have been hung in the rotunda, and as you walk round it doesn't take long to spot the art-historical references; the skeletons of horses in the monochromatic Black Rationality (1982), for instance, refer directly to Picasso's Guernica. Other works suggest Miro, Kandinsky and Richter. Oehlen wants to expose what he feels is art's failure in the modern world, wanting the handling of paint itself to create a new subversive energy in an historic medium.

In his more recent work, such as DJ Techno (2001), Oehlen has added computer-generated design (which he uses to incorporate photo-collage elements) and ink-jet printing to his arsenal. The result is, I think, one of his most successful works, one in which (even though there are some Tanguy-ish moments) he seems to discover a route out of his self-made art-historical labyrinth.

Possibly the most intriguing artist in this exhibition is Kai Althoff, born in 1966 but in his paintings harking back to pre-First World War German history and the homoerotic appeal of jackbooted Prussian soldiers and pretty boys in decadent Berlin cabarets. In these exquisite small-scale works there are hints of George Grosz, notably in Dei Handi (2003), a frieze of sharply observed grotesques drawn in ink on board, and a nod to Schiele in Untitled (1999), a portrait of a young boy in watercolour, pen and ink. Perhaps the most sinister of these tiny works is Untitled (2000), in which Prussian soldiers are shown kicking a recumbent man, with - deep in the birch woods of myth - that essential ingredient of scary folklore, a wolf, as complicit observer to this savage and erotic scene.

Thomas Scheibitz, born in 1968 and Germany's choice for this year's Venice Biennale pavilion, evokes the troubled inter-war years of the Weimar Republic and, in particular, the cool machine-aesthetic modernism of the Bauhaus, evidenced in the work of Joseph Albers.

Scheibitz takes the banalities of a ski-lift or a grey Mitteleuropa suburb, abstracts them into flat planes and creates the illusion of depth and distance using a flat pastel palette. This is most successful in Anlage (2000), in which the flat planes overlap and resonate to create deep perspective.

Wilhelm Sasnal, born in 1972, is Polish, the odd man out in terms of this predominantly German show and preoccupied with eastern Europe after the fall of Communism. Much of his work in this exhibition refers to Soviet Social Realism, to propaganda and to early photo-journalism. Portrait of Rodchenko, Lady (2002), belongs to the Soviet era in its inspiration but also looks eerily like a freeze-frame from Leni Riefenstahl's supreme piece of filmed propaganda The Triumph of the Will. The Factory (2000) is taken directly from a famous Soviet propaganda image, but in Sasnal's picture the workers, far from being happily productive for the common good, are bored and dehumanised by the production line.

Two artists in this show don't hark back to the past. Franz Ackermann, born in 1963, takes a jaundiced look at the shrinking world of global tourism through a brightly coloured, Op Art prism. He describes his works as "mental maps", and these postcards from the apocalyptic edge spin pieces of landscapes, street maps, interiors out of their settings into an organic whirl of catastrophe and confusion.

Dirk Skreber, born in 1961, takes as his subject natural and man-made catastrophes. These huge hyper-realist paintings have all the slick gloss and lacquered perfection of carefully photographed car advertisements, yet paint is evident, not concealed, in dribbles and rough brush strokes which look like afterthought, and which heighten rather than destroy the mechanics of the hyper-real illusion. Beautiful, disturbing, subversive, like so much work in this new show, Skreber's work demonstrates that paint, if not triumphant, has managed to survive and mutate in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.