The Sunday Times/uk
November 22, 2009
Charles Saatchi’s new generation of artists
Will the artist’s latest, more conventional, unveiling have the same
effect on the next generation of British artists?
(Pal Hanson/Sunday Times Magazine)
Ryan Mosley
Anthony Gardner
For many art lovers, the Sensation exhibition of 1997 was a cultural
disaster akin to the sack of Rome. The Royal Academy, home for over
200 years to the nation’s most accomplished artists, was given up to
the shock troops of Britart, with Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin and Marcus
Harvey to the fore. Chief of the Visigoths was Charles Saatchi, whose
collection made up the show – to some a fearless champion of
contemporary taste, to others its arch villain.
Twelve years is a blink of an eye in the history of art, but for those
at its cutting edge it’s a lifetime. The enfants terribles have become
elder statesmen complaining of 50% tax rates; collectors who jumped on
the Saatchi bandwagon have suffered serious reversals, among them
Steven Cohen, the American hedge-fund billionaire who paid £6.5m for
Damien Hirst’s shark in 2005, and whose recent decision to show $450m
worth of art from his collection at Sotheby’s New York was seen as a
desperate attempt to shore up its value.
Meanwhile, the American company ArtLoan reports an `exponential’
growth in business from overstretched collectors borrowing money
against their works of art. The question, as Saatchi prepares for the
first group show of British art at his new Chelsea gallery, is whether
or not his Midas touch can work in the present economic climate and
create a new generation of multimillionaires.
Newspeak: British Art Now, currently showing at the Hermitage in St
Petersburg, transfers to London next summer. The work, by 24 artists,
including one chosen through BBC2’s School of Saatchi (a four-week
series that starts tomorrow, at 9pm), encompasses wood and fibreglass
dummies, busts with artificial hair, and a polystyrene wave decorated
with cigarette ends. Inevitably, the show will be compared to
Sensation in its power to shock and its ability to propel artists into
the financial stratosphere.
`Newspeak doesn’t have the coarseness or brutality of much of the work
from the Sensation period,’ says Saatchi, `but there are quite a few
good artists coming out of Britain, so I hope we produce a round-up
that will stop people asking if British Art has been sat in a lay-by
since the YBAs.’
Though he was recently demoted to No 72 in ArtReview magazine’s annual
`Power 100′ list, Saatchi’s continuing ability to hit the jackpot was
shown by Christie’s autumn sale of contemporary art. Two paintings
from his collection, Martin Kippenberger’s Paris Bar and Kellner
Des…(Waiter Of…), stole the show by fetching £2.28m and £1.1m
respectively: double their estimates. If Saatchi follows his usual
game plan, this money will be invested in work by relatively unknown
artists.
`He is very good at spotting new talent,’ says Bridget Brown, who
advises companies on investing in art. `When an interesting new artist
has a show you always see him there, and he arrives early. He often
picks them up when they’re with young dealers. He does sometimes miss
a trick – he bought Peter Doig very late in the day – but not often.
He’s an obsessive and acquisitive person; to be a collector of that
status you have to be.’
Can he, though, create an art superstar single-handedly? Brown says
not. `It isn’t simply a question of a collector buying low and selling
high – an awful lot goes on in between, with dealers working very
carefully to develop artists’ careers. Critics, museum directors and
curators all play a huge part.’ Hirst may have risen faster than most,
but this was thanks to his business sense and genius for
self-promotion rather than any Saatchi-assisted short cuts.
What Saatchi can be credited with is helping to create the whole
contemporary art scene as we know it now, without which none of the
YBAs would have struck it rich.
`When he started going to their early shows in 1990, the situation
both here and in New York was desperate,’ remembers one long-term
associate. `There were very few collectors, we didn’t have Tate
Modern, and galleries were closing left, right and centre; so from
then until 1994-5 he had very little competition and was able to clean
up. Since then so many more important players have emerged that his
influence has inevitably diminished. If Newspeak doesn’t have the same
impact as Sensation, it will be because the cultural landscape has
changed so much. Having said that, he still has an enormous appetite
for art. He simply loves it: when he comes into a gallery and sees
something he likes, his whole body language changes. He’s done a huge
amount for art, and not just in Britain.’
So what effect will Newspeak’s visit to St Petersburg have on the
Russian art world? Saatchi blazed the trail by sending USA Today, an
exhibition of new American art from his collection, to the Hermitage
last year. A London-based Russian dealer who wishes to remain
anonymous sees these moves as a brilliant strategy for tapping into a
highly lucrative aspirational market. `There is a cabal of curators,
critics and gallery owners who want the world to believe that Russian
collectors are among the most important on the international scene,’
he says. `That simply isn’t true at the moment: Roman Abramovich may
have paid £43m for Francis Bacon’s Triptych last year, but it was an
ill-advised purchase made at the top of the market. However, it could
prove a self-fulfilling prophecy – and if those collectors buy from
Saatchi or even just push the market up, he’s going to do extremely
well out of it.’ But what of the artists themselves? Will he feather
their nests at the same time?
Ryan Mosley
A few years ago, Ryan Mosley’s chances of becoming an internationally
exhibited artist looked slim. At 24 he had an unfashionable degree in
drawing and painting, had twice been turned down by the Royal College
of Art, and was working as a delivery driver for a Sheffield
supermarket to cover accommodation and a £20-a-week studio. `The job
was really badly paid, but it had its advantages. I used the van to
move my paintings around, and I also worked on the delicatessen
counter, where I could buy a chicken for 10p when it reached its
sell-by date.’ The highlight of his year was a group show at the
city’s most established gallery: `Three people came to the opening
night.’
Soon after, he moved to London and things began to look up: the Royal
College finally accepted him, and he found more congenial work as a
security guard at the National Gallery. Then, at his degree show in
2007, his carnival-inspired paintings caught Saatchi’s eye: `He spent
a lot of time looking, but didn’t buy anything. But eight months later
I was in a group exhibition in Bethnal Green and bought three
large-scale paintings.’ It was `a skin-pinching moment’. As a
17-year-old in Huddersfield, he missed a college expedition to
Sensation, but had been infected by his fellow students’ excitement:
`Thumbing through the catalogue opened my eyes to all kinds of
possibilities. But I still thought, `This could never happen to me.’ ‘
Saatchi bought two more of Mosley’s paintings, Sirens and The Curious
Tale of the Butterfly Head, from a solo show in Vienna in 2008 (`He
didn’t come to it. He sent his director, Philly Adams, and he went on
her yea or nay’); then another two at last year’s Concrete and Glass
festival in London. This had `a domino effect’ says Mosley. `When
those pictures went on his website, I started getting e-mails and
phone calls every day, particularly from collectors in Italy and New
York – and that’s continued ever since. If Saatchi’s got faith in
something, and carries on buying, it definitely encourages others. It
isn’t a guarantee that the work will do well, but it makes it less of
a risk for them.’
It would be wrong to imagine that being taken up by Saatchi involves
an invitation to shoot the breeze and feast on Nigella’s hotpot at the
court of King Charles: like most of the artists interviewed here,
Mosley has not met his patron. Nor does it mean instant riches, though
his paintings fetch considerably more than they did two years ago –
£12,000 each, as opposed to the £3,000-£4,000 Saatchi paid.
Mosley reckons that a large piece takes him between four and six weeks
on average, which means that, with unflagging inspiration and a steady
demand, he could make in the region of £120,000 a year. But that
figure does not allow for the cut of 40 to 50% which any gallery he
sells through is likely to take. `As long as I can have a studio and
work, I’m happy,’ he says. `I’m not wanting to drive a Ferrari or own
a yacht.’ For Mosley, the greatest benefit of his success is a roomy
studio in west London for which he pays £500 a month. `I’m a realist,’
he says. `All this happened very quickly, and could end tomorrow.
Finding a gallery in London and having seven pictures in a major
collection has given me buoyancy, but what happens if people stop
investing in art? Everyone in this exhibition just has to hope it will
open more doors.’
Sigrid Holmwood
Like her friend Ryan Mosley, Sigrid Holmwood has wrestled with the
accusation that painting is irrelevant to modern life. To her,
however, the medium’s antiquity is one of the best reasons for using
it: `When you’ve got a problem, you can look at any point in art
history and see how they tackled it. In a way I feel like an
experimental archeologist.’
She certainly takes historical research further than most. Visitors to
the Compton Verney gallery in Warwickshire, where she has re-created
her studio as part of a current exhibition, will find her using
traditional methods to make her own paint from scratch: `You learn so
much about how it works – each pigment has its own character, which
gives you ideas you could never get from buying it in tubes.’ She even
paints as part of a group devoted to reconstructing 16th-century life:
`We sleep on straw mattresses in Tudor buildings wearing linen
nightdresses. It’s all very serious.’
Her work, though, is not entirely retrospective. The paintings in
Newspeak portray vanished scenes from peasant life, but are executed
in startling Day-Glo colours: fluorescent paints, she remarks, have
many similarities to ancient vegetable dyes such as madder.
Though raised in Scotland, Holmwood is half Swedish, and found
inspiration for her first solo show in the Dalarna region, famous for
its 18th- and 19th-century arts and crafts. `Saatchi bought six of my
paintings and wanted more, but they were sold out, so he took some I’d
done with the Tudor group instead. I also do landscapes, which people
find easier to like, but he was definitely drawn to the figures, which
can be quite bizarre.’
Her paintings, which sold for around £2,000 three years ago, now go
for between £4,000 and £15,000; taking £9,500 as an average, a show
containing 23 works painted in the course of the year – as her last
one at the Annely Juda gallery did – would give her an income of
around £100,000 after the gallery’s cut. `My gallery takes the same as
most galleries,’ she says, `and they deserve every penny. They give me
a lot of support, they are very hardworking and very generous with
their time and resources.’
How far has Saatchi’s interest helped her saleability?
`That’s a difficult question,’ says David Juda of Annely Juda. `There
is a benefit, but it’s not as enormous as is perceived. There was a
very good reaction to Sigrid’s work even before Charles Saatchi bought
it, and if he decided not to purchase any more, it wouldn’t be
disastrous.’
Holmwood herself is ambivalent about Saatchi’s patronage. `Being
bought by him is great, but he’s associated with a certain kind of
art, and you don’t want people’s perceptions of your work to be
changed by that powerful brand. When I was at art school it was what
everyone hoped for; when you’re older and wiser you think, `This is
great, but in a few years’ time he’ll be buying a whole lot of younger
artists.”
She would be surprised if Newspeak provoked the same reactions as
Sensation. `I don’t think anyone’s going to be throwing ink at our
work. Everything has become a lot subtler: there is much more emphasis
on the materials and craft. It isn’t as bombastic and shocking.’
Jonathan Wateridge
Jonathan Wateridge’s studio in Hackney is a schoolboy’s idea of
heaven. There are scale models of a space capsule and a
Thunderbirds-style house; there are knightly costumes to dress up in
and flintlocks to brandish. But for Wateridge, 37, these are props
rather than toys, essential to the creation of his large-scale, filmic
paintings.
Although Wateridge describes painting as his first love, he has only
felt able to pursue it in the past five years. As a student at Glasgow
School of Art in the early 1990s he was persuaded that it was
obsolete; instead, he tried `a million other ways of making art’,
including film and melting wax on glass, while earning a living as an
illustrator (for The Sunday Times Magazine among others): `In the end
I realised I was always circling around painting.’
It was paintings done on multiple layers of Perspex that first brought
Charles Saatchi into his life. `They were all fantastical cinematic
visions of disasters and extreme landscapes,’ says Wateridge. `I was
looking at a lot of 18th-century Romantic painters, which became mixed
with the adventure of B movies.’
Saatchi was keen to buy from an exhibition at the David Risley Gallery
in 2006, but found it sold out; fortunately, says Wateridge, `I
happened to be there, and suggested he come back to the studio to look
at some of my other work, which he did. Over the next year he came
round four or five times. I was moving on from the Perspex paintings,
and when I did a four-metre landscape of plane wreckage in a jungle
and my first figure painting, of a group of Sandinistas, he said,
`Right, I’ll take those.”
Orchestrating tableaux with multiple sitters is a big part of
Wateridge’s procedure. For a recent painting he mocked up a TV studio
with actors filming a murder scene: `I basically do a photoshoot where
anything can happen. I might take 2,000 pictures to find the moment
I’m after.’ The sets are also made in miniature, complete with working
lights: `I enjoy the Blue Peter aspect to what we do.’
At present Wateridge is working on a series of seven paintings that he
describes as `moments from a disaster movie where you never see the
disaster’. They will probably represent a year’s work, and given that
his large-scale works have fetched more than £20,000 each, should
bring in around £150,000 – though again, as much as half of that could
go to paying a gallery’s commission.
Wateridge took an instant liking to Saatchi: `There’s nothing
pretentious about him, and he says what he thinks. We had a great
afternoon in the studio where he talked about why he started his
collection. It was at the beginning of the nervousness in the
financial and art markets, but he didn’t seem perturbed – he said it
would bring art back to the people who love really collecting. He
talked about other collectors who had inspired him, and suggested
galleries I should be working with. It was fascinating, since he
obviously has vast, vast experience of it all.’
He admits, however, that Saatchi’s patronage can have drawbacks. `As
an emerging artist I think you have to be careful, because a lot of
people in the art world have strong opinions about him, and not always
positive ones.’ This hostility stems in part from Saatchi’s
involvement with the Italian painter and sculptor Sandro Chia in the
late 1980s. An artist’s long-term reputation is most effectively
secured when important institutions buy his work; and as these are
often government-funded and short of cash, it’s in the dealers’
interest to keep prices relatively low to begin with.
Their nightmare is a collector who creates a sudden buzz around an
artist, pushing prices right up, and then dumps his work on the
market, pushing them down again – as Saatchi did when he sold seven of
Chia’s pieces in one go. Now, says Wateridge: `Artists have woken up
to the fact that Saatchi was given too much power and that you don’t
want to sell to him – or anybody – wholesale. You still have to
respect him for going to see everything, making time to check out all
the little East End galleries rather than just sending a minion. And
if it wasn’t for him, Nicholas Serota and Damien Hirst – whatever you
think of their agenda – people like me wouldn’t even be starting to
have careers.’
Caragh Thuring
After leaving art school in 1995, Caragh Thuring spent eight years
trying to avoid her destiny. `I did loads of things – wardrobe for
GMTV, photographer’s assistant – and then ran a gallery. But in the
end I thought, `I’m on the wrong side of this – I want to try and make
art, even if I only ever get to have one exhibition.’ And actually,
all those other things have contributed in some funny way.’
Art is in Thuring’s blood: her Scottish-Irish mother is also a
painter, and her Dutch father is a photographer, gilder and carver –
who, coincidentally, has been consulted on the restoration of the
Hermitage. She grew up partly on the west coast of Scotland (`I went
to a school with 25 pupils, occasionally swelled by gypsies who camped
on the beach in summer’) and partly in Sussex. When she was 15 she was
taken to a Frank Stella show at the Pompidou Centre in Paris which was
to have a lasting impact: `I told myself that I had to be involved in
this somehow.’
Her own paintings are very different from Stella’s: graceful
constructions of geometric lines and sparingly applied bright colours,
often focusing on urban landscapes. Her current show in New York
consists of reinterpretations of Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe –
like Jonathan Wateridge, she names Manet, Goya and Velázquez as three
of her favourite artists, and, like him, she settled on painting only
after exploring many other media. Whatever else comes to the fore, she
believes: `Painting will always exist and people will always want to
look at it.’
Thuring met Charles Saatchi three years ago while dismantling a joint
exhibition in Dalston; he bought one of her paintings, and
subsequently another seven from different exhibitions. `I think he’s
an amusing character,’ she says. `I appreciate his passion and
directness. He knows what he’s looking at and engages with the work in
a way that not many people do. He also takes risks. His Boundary Road
gallery was the most beautiful space, and he had incredible
exhibitions there.’
How far has the Saatchi effect helped her career?
`I can’t say exactly. But interest in art has grown exponentially in
Britain, and of course he has been a part of that, which in turn makes
it possible to earn a living doing what you want with your life.’
Carla Busuttil
Although Charles Saatchi bought all 13 of Carla Busuttil’s paintings
at her degree show last year – negotiating a discount for a bulk
purchase – it was only through the grapevine that she heard of her
inclusion in Newspeak. `Some friends mentioned it,’ she says, `and
then a month later the Saatchi Gallery asked for my biography. They
don’t tell you very much about what’s going on.’
The pictures are naive paintings based on magazine photographs of
politicians. `I’ve always been interested in themes of power and
politics,’ she says – not surprisingly, since she was brought up in
South Africa and studied at Witwatersrand University under tutors who
had seen the full horror of apartheid. In 2005, aged 23, she moved to
London to study at the Royal Academy, and was surprised to find her
fellow students much less attuned to current affairs: `Politics in
this country seems to be viewed with a lot of suspicion. I struggled
with that a bit, because I was always having to explain myself.’
Descended from refugees who fled Armenia for Greece at the beginning
of the last century and eventually settled in England (where her
father – a trading consultant – met her mother before emigrating to
South Africa), Busuttil is now working on a series of paintings of the
genocide witnessed by her family. She recently gave up her studio in
Deptford in order to move to Berlin – partly because it is a city she
loves, and partly as an economy measure. `You can afford a much bigger
place to work in,’ she explains. `In London
I paid £250 a month for a 250 sq ft studio in Deptford; here I am
paying slightly less for a studio more than double the size. In
addition, the rent for my flat is around a third of what I was paying
for a similar space in London.’
As a teenager in Johannesburg she had been only vaguely aware of the
Sensation exhibition; but to have her work bought by Saatchi has been
an enormous thrill: `It took a while to get my head round what was
happening. It only dawned on me much later what it might mean.’
Shortly afterwards, unaware of Saatchi’s purchase, the West End
gallery Gimpel Fils offered her a solo show: `I had to tell them all
of the pictures were gone, and I needed to paint more. Everything’s
happened so incredibly quickly.’
Pablo Bronstein
If there is one artist who believes he has no need of exposure in
Newspeak, it is 32-year-old Pablo Bronstein. Although three of his
architecturally inspired pen-and-ink drawings are included, he claims
that he hasn’t given the exhibition a second thought: `I’ve just been
so busy with other projects. But I’m very happy that it’s at the
Hermitage. What a place to tell yourself you’ve had work in!’
Bronstein’s list of other projects is certainly impressive. He is
working with the architects Caruso St John to create a room in the new
Nottingham Contemporary gallery; recovering from a ballet in Turin,
for which he did the stage design and choreography; masterminding a
one-day `flash installation’ at the Chisenhale Gallery in London;
preparing pieces for biennials in Romania and Spain; contributing to a
show of art and dance at the Hayward Gallery in London; designing a
garden for Tate Britain’s Sculpture Court; and planning a performance
with the Scottish Ballet. This is not to mention two books he is
writing and a current exhibition of his work at the Metropolitan
Museum of Art in New York.
So does he consider himself a Renaissance man?
`I would if my interests were varied,’ he says, `but I don’t think
they are – I’m very interested in architecture, which is a very, very
narrow subject, and I’m just exploring it from different angles.’ It
was at the age of seven that Bronstein decided he wanted to be an
architect. But when the time came to begin training he was horribly
disappointed: `I didn’t realise it was all about building regulations.
I stuck it for three weeks.’
Instead, he went to Central St Martins to do a foundation course,
followed by the Slade. `I did shitty odd jobs for a year or two –
mind-numbingly boring – and then went to Goldsmiths, where I started
playing with different mediums: I made films, posters, installations.’
His interest in dance began with a series of installations
commissioned by the Tate’s curator of performance. `They turned out to
be very interactive and theatrical, making the viewer into a
performer.’ Charles Saatchi appeared on the scene at Bronstein’s first
solo exhibition: `He bought one or two pieces then, and has been
buying fairly regularly ever since – he has about seven now.’
But it is to another heavy hitter, the New York art consultant Thea
Westreich, that Bronstein feels most indebted: `She bought all the
major pieces from my first show before it even opened. That was my
real breakthrough.’ At Art Basel in June his diptych New Design for
the Treatment of Walls for the Display of a Painting in Oils sold for
£16,800.
He concedes that Saatchi’s purchases include one of his key pieces.
The drawing is what he calls a `mythical dramatisation’ of an
extraordinary architectural project, in which a giant arch is pulled
into position on rollers by scores of horses. It is a work that
captures the excitement of architecture while sidestepping its
frustrations: `The truth is, I don’t know a single architect who’s
happy and doing what he wants to do.’
There is a strong possibility that the artists being shown in Newspeak
will be bracketed together in the public mind just as the Sensation
artists were. Does Bronstein object to this? No, he says: `Saatchi
buys the work he likes and he’s allowed to arrange it any way he
wants.’ But having made it to the Metropolitan Museum on his own,
Bronstein sees his future very much as a solo venture: `To be
interviewed about a group show when I’ve got my name on a 50ft banner
on Fifth Avenue is actually rather strange.’
Newspeak: British Art Now is at the State Hermitage Museum, St
Petersburg, Russia, until January 17, 2010.
It will open at the Saatchi Gallery, London SW3, in June 2010. Visit
www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk