[Brookside]

Dirk Skreber. 2004. It Rocks Us So Hard Ho-Ho-Ho

Charles Saatchi - Modern Medici


Want to see up-to-the-minute contemporary painting? Check out this web-site of literally hundreds of international artists - most in their 30's and 40's - in the collection of English billionaire Sir Charles Saatchi. Hit the link below and try it. You might be surprised. Every time I revisit there are new artists to check out...and new features like the artists blog. This is a relatively cool trip through high culture without the moralising goofiness that puts off a lot of people.

The web-site has essays on painting by some prestigious art-historians- a virtual tour thru the new gallery’s digs ( in the gigantic heap of what was the Duke of York’s HQ in Sloane Square) and over 2,000 super hi-res jpgs of artists in the collection. Want to talk art?- there’s a very active blog. Check out London Art Schools?...there are links. This is an incredibly packed website that’s easy to navigate.

The Saatchi Gallery in London isn’t really a gallery- it’s a museum housing the contemporary art collection of Charles Saatchi - specializing in mid-career artists from Britain, U.S.A. and Germany. Charles Saatchi made his initial fortune as a media advisor to the Thatcher government in the 1970’s as well as handling various international commercial advertising accounts.

During the 1980’s he began collecting contemporary British art on a massive scale buying out entire shows from Chelsea galleries-and in the process, creating instant millionaires of the artists and gallery dealers he frequented. Every couple of years he will sell off his current collection on the international market and re-invest the profits in new art.

Right now he is collecting new paintings on a scale that is unmatched in contemporary times. Downside? He can make or break an artists’ reputation by unloading work far below the price he paid...which he has done...or he can anoint an artist by buying paintings already sold and offering owners 3 and 4 times their sale price. Some refuse- many don’t.


http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk

[Brookside]

Dana Schutz from the Saatchi collection - I dig her work - she paints this image again and again of women re-assembling themselves.
Troubling & Funny!

[Brookside]

Brit > David Batchelor.
He gathers these low-tek sign boxes from street markets around London, puts various colored lights in them and the result is a street-wise conglomeration of artificial beauty.
An el-cheapo riff on the grid paintings of Piet Mondrian. Cool!

[Galligan]

Very nice, thanks for sharing.

[Brookside]

SAATCHI GALLERY LAUNCHES DATING SERVICE
London’s Saatchi Gallery has vastly increased traffic to its web site by opening it up to all comers, inviting artists to post jpgs of their works and more, all for free [see Artnet News, Apr. 14, 2006]. Now, the venturesome folks over there have launched a new project designed to allow art-lovers to get together, Friendster-style. Participants create a profile, and then can make contacts as they wish. The rest is up to the stars! For details, see http://www.saatchigallery.com/meetothers

[Brookside]

Another cool-smart painting from the Saatchi collection... titled "U.S. World Studies 2" by Californian Jules de Balincourt.
This and other paintings by him will be in a large group show called U.S.A. Today at the Royal Academy of Arts
in October 2006 that critiques life (both good and bad) in the U.S.
Hey what's to criticize...it's great here! Yes? Yes.

[Brookside]

JoAnne Greenbaum's 2004 painting, "Table of Content" from the upcoming exhibit "Abstract America" at the Saatchi.
Is she good or what?
Check out how the painting combines American gestural abstraction from the 1950's and a sort of historical nod to grid paintings...all with a great deal of panache and humor.
It's too late to say she's an "insiders painter" (she was)
because Charles Saatchi has bought up 4 of her works. Great stuff...Not earth shattering...but really really good.

[Brookside]

54 year-old Albert Oehlen out of Hamburg Germany. "Sketched Hound", 2005. apprx. 81x102"
The king of grey. & a real heavyweight painter- real in the sense that Oehlen is hip to painting's history
and can do just about whatever he wants with a brush and paint...realistic, abstract- you name it, it's all grist for the mill with this guy.
Uneven (sometimes his stuff is a bit too glib- & glib is part of his repetoire)) but breathtaking when he hits it...as he does here.
Saatchi had 6-7 Oehlen's on view in Part 2 of "Triumph of Painting" that ran from July to October of 2005.
A painter's painter.

[Brookside]

A computer-generated image shows a view of the planned annex for Tate Modern, the contemporary-art museum in London.
The Swiss architecture firm of Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron has taken on the 11-story extension, which will allow the museum to cater to its four million visitors each year.


Tate Modern Announces Plans for an Annex.
London's Tate Modern, which now says it is the most visited modern-art museum on earth, unveiled plans on Tuesday for a striking $397 million extension to be completed for the 2012 London Olympics.

The annex, which resembles glass boxes stacked up arbitrarily to form a 220-foot pyramid, has been designed by the Swiss firm Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, the same architects who in the late 1990’s turned an abandoned power station on the south bank of the Thames, across from St. Paul’s Cathedral, into Tate Modern.

The addition will make the museum comparable in size to the Georges Pompidou Center in Paris and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

“It was designed for 1.8 million people per year,” said Sir Nicholas Serota, who as director of Tate also oversees Tate Britain, Tate Liverpool and Tate St. Ives, “and now we have over four million visitors per year.” The Tate said that figure compares with 2.5 million visitors annually for the Pompidou and 2.7 million for MoMAVicente Todoli, the director of Tate Modern, said that on weekends “we have people looking at people looking at people looking at art — not the best experience.”

The 11-story annex, which will be entered either from a new plaza or through Tate Modern’s vast Turbine Hall, will provide relief from crowding by offering new galleries of different shapes and sizes intended to accommodate installations, videos, film, photography, performance and other nontraditional art forms.

The opportunity to build emerged by good fortune: the French-owned electricity company E.D.F Energy, which in 2000 retained the southern third of the Tate Modern building as a substation, decided to release half of this space as part of its own modernization.

In the late 1990’s, when Tate Modern was given $90 million from national lottery profits for its building conversion project, the Victoria and Albert Museum’s planned extension was refused such aid, by all accounts because of opposition to Daniel Libeskind’s very modern design.

Since then, public resistance to contemporary architecture has softened. And because Tate Modern is now the strongest symbol of London’s rapid emergence as a cultural capital, it could become a good candidate to receive more lottery funds. As for private contributions, Sir Nicholas said it might be possible to name some galleries after major donors.

For Londoners, though, the principal curiosity will be the annex’s appearance. And here, Mr. Herzog and Mr. De Meuron have chosen not to be shy. In a statement they said that it would be “simpleminded arrogance” for the annex to dominate Tate Modern, but that it would also be “false modesty” to hide it behind the existing building.

Thus, as seen from the river, the top of the pyramid, or ziggurat, as one architecture critic described it, will be visible above the broad facade of the current museum. Viewed from the south, though, the annex will make a far stronger statement, with its thick glass windows and walls suggesting transparency and solidity.


An illustration of Tate Modern’s planned extension, which will feature glass boxes stacked to form a ziggurat.

“A lot has still to be defined, and that is on purpose,” Mr. Herzog said. “We are free to make changes up the end. This is a working strategy.”

NYT/Alan Riding

[Brookside]

"In Mental Map: Evasion V, Franz Ackermann creates a biotic abstraction, a template for natural phenomena dictated by design. His jumbled composition is harmonious in its turmoil: concentric patterns of colour expose hints of identifiable place (a street map, a building interior, a snippet of landscape) only to dislocate them in a maze of organic generalisations." 1996.

That's the blurb from the website- actually, he's better than this. Another globe-trotting German artist...what's with that trend?...who records urban sprawl and city culture from around the world. His small paintings, which this one isn't, are jewels of color and draughtsmanship.