Home
sign up| features / feature |
 content by: editor |
 the triumph of painting 2
 to access audio and video on collective you need real player.Three writers review Part Two of Saatchi’s painting fad. Part One of The Triumph Of Painting marked a return to form for the Saatchi Gallery. Having evicted the YBA circus which has dominated the gallery since its relocation in 2003, Charles Saatchi has returned to putting on landmark exhibitions showcasing international contemporary art. Part Two of this three-part, yearlong exhibition includes five German and one Polish artist. Dirk Skreber wears the trendy-artist cap well, but his slick photorealist style and clever subjects lack substance. The same goes for Kai Althoff. The gallery’s main space, the rotunda, is handed over to Albert Oehlen. His work employs the Paris squat look but is more then an abstract expressionist cliché. Top marks go to Thomas Scheibitz and Franz Ackermann, although the quiet star of this show is Wilhelm Sasnal. Sasnal’s paintings feel like thickly painted Luc Tuymans, minus the angst. There’s a Kraftwerk album cover look to Sasnal’s paintings - his use of simple colours and graphics to describe diverse subjects please both the eye and the brain. Gemma de Cruz  Untitled (detail) by Dirk Skreber & Piece (detail) by Albert Oehlen. There will always be issues with Saatchi Gallery exhibitions; there’s something haphazard about them. A group of artists thrown together because they’ve all been lying around in the same vault. Because they are one man’s collection. County Hall also comes with its own set of headaches. The rooms are uneven. The wood panelling doesn’t fit the work. Often the paintings are drowned and deadened by the large rooms or cramped in the small ones. However, the artists that Saatchi has chosen for Part Two of The Triumph Of Painting aren’t that terrible. Franz Ackermann’s abstract psychedelics and Kai Althoff’s Egon Schiele-like war images are the high points. Polish painter Wilhelm Sasnal’s bad compositions are the lows. Nothing in any of the rooms is half as awe-inspiring as the White Cube’s current Anselm Kiefer exhibition of truly triumphant paintings. Saatchi instead brings together work that is simply fun to complain about. Francesca Gavin  Untitled (detail) by Kai Althoff & Mental Map: Evasion VI (detail) by Franz Ackermann. The second exhibition in Charles Saatchi’s yearlong trilogy to painting takes a distinctly Eastern European theme, showcasing the work of five German artists and one lone Pole (Wilhelm Sasnal). A keen collector of German art, this is not new territory for Saatchi, and the role call features many of those he has championed in the past. First up is Dirk Skreber, a painter whose distorted perspective offers an otherworldly vision of everyday life. From aerial images of waterlogged houses to cars wrapped around lampposts like sticky toffee, Skreber muses on humanity’s vulnerability without offering the viewer any figurative content. Franz Ackerman’s cosmic teasers have a similar sensibility. Psychedelic graphics that revel in their artificiality, yet as psychologically redundant as Leary’s call to “tune in and drop out” – their spinning discs and double helixes a poignant metaphor for the acid fallout of the 60s generation. It is perhaps this nihilism that Albert Oehlen is concerned with in his darkly satanic paintings, particularly Black Rationality, an unearthly vision of skeletal creatures pecking at the dry bones of a carcass. For an artist whose preoccupation is with art’s failures, Oehlen’s bleak imagery appears like a primal scream for creativity. Painting isn’t dead, it’s angry. Jessica Lack The Triumph Of Painting 2 is at The Saatchi Gallery, London, until 30 October 05.
 conversations
Read members' comments.
|
 |
related info
 useful linkswww.whitecube.com
note: The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
see also
related member reviews
also on bbc.co.uk
on bbc news on bbc news on bbc news on bbc news books  books and comics archive Author interviews and reviews from 2002 to 2008. games  games archive Gaming features and weekly columns from 2002 to 2008. |
send to a friend
the triumph of painting - pt.1
access 1000s of articles