BOILER ROOM ART: Saatchi To Exhibit Basement Sensation
LONDON (API) - The Saatchi Gallery has been a major – if not the major – influence on art in Britain since its first incarnation. It has also had a history of media controversy, which it has courted, and has had extremes of critical reaction. Many artists shown at the gallery are unknown not only to the general public but also to the commercial art world: showing at the gallery has provided a springboard to launch careers. But perhaps none has had such a phenomenal bounce as South Leeds house painter and handyman Martin Pottinger.
In the art world, Charles Saatchi’s name is already written in stone. To some he is the greatest thing that ever happened to contemporary art. His passion for art is unquestioned. To others, however, he is a dealer in collector's stock, using his influence to manipulate the market. He buys an artist's work in bulk and at low prices, then watches. There are many takers for the Charles Saatchi brand. Art prices can both rocket and plummet at his whim.
There also was a time - and it wasn't so long ago - that Mr Saatchi used to spend his Saturday mornings trawling the edgier, grungier, not-yet-gentrified areas of London for up-and-coming, smart young art talent.
The British collector still goes shopping on Saturday mornings, but these days he mostly stays closer to home in Chelsea. And his discoveries now tend to be more modest when you consider his latest stumble downstairs at his new Chelsea gallery at Sloane Square.
Upon surveying recent renovation in the basement of his new gallery, Mr Saatchi was startled by 56 year-old Pottinger’s boiler room walls which were spattered with mud patching and of half-finished rollered paint. "My God, this is what great art should be." said Saatchi. "Something that gives real visual pleasure and makes you sit up and think, not the pseudo-controversial rehashed claptrap that so many actually believe is cutting-edge art."
The artist studied at the British Gypsum Drywall Academy training centre at East Leake, in Leicestershire. Several sections of his still fresh walls have already been cut away and mounted on supports, so that they may be exhibited as their own piece when Saatchi’s gallery opens in early 2007.
Plenty of people have had the dream of finding a lost or hidden masterpiece in their attic, but how does one respond to what they find a common worker doing in their basement? Mr Saatchi isn’t alone in his convictions of this underground art and its potential on the art market. Such "isolation and visual focus denotes importance: the greater the masterpiece, the greater its separation from other objects that might compete for attention." Victoria Newhouse writes in her book, Art and the Power of Placement.
Mr Saatchi, who almost never grants interviews or speaks publicly, said that the fresh drywall work in his gallery's boiler room was "infinitely more exciting than almost anything seen upstairs in years".
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