Painting skills get brush-up

Fison Guner, Metro

Contemporary artists are no longer ashamed of wielding a paintbrush, of painting recognisable subject matter – or even, just occasionally, dispensing with the tired conceit of irony. We even have a painter, of traditional still lifes no less, shortlisted for this year’s Turner Prize.

Charles Saatchi has sought to give an extended fanfare to painting’s return to favour in this three-part exhibition that showcases 31 painters in all. Just dig that bombastic title for starters.

So Part Two returns with a further six artists. As before, the emphasis is on Northern Europe: five of the artists featured are German, the sixth is Polish. There will be one or two Brits featured in Part Three, when 19 artists will be shown but for now Saatchi’s attention is with our European brethren. And, judging from the seductive display here, his choices can’t be faulted.

Polish artist Wilhelm Sasnal is a bit like Luc Tuymans, the Belgian superstar painter, who featured in Part One. Sasnal’s canvases are generally muted in colour, often strangely cropped, and usually disquieting. His images are gleaned from newspapers and photographs, and they have something of Tuymans' deadened quality.

Overall, there’s an aggressive, anxious and apocalyptic feel to this exhibition, in which no female artists are present. Dirk Skreber paints car crashes, empty train carriages and aerial images of industrial wastelands, depopulated and as if frozen in time, while Kai Althoff pays homage to the German Expressionism of such political artists as Käthe Kollwitz, with his (slightly homoeroticised) World War I imagery.

Elsewhere, Albert Oehlen’s huge, overwrought paintings veer from figurative to abstract, with a hint of technological dystopia thrown in. This is a theme further explored in Thomas Scheibitz’s paintings, though these are undermined by their seductive, candy-coloured exuberance.

And lastly, with its bold, brashly coloured, over-spilling Pop forms, Franz Ackermann’s work is nothing less than exuberant. So, a triumph? Well, certainly a modest one.