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I was rather excited about going to The Saatchi Gallery. I'm no art historian and can't tell my conceptual from my contemporary, but hoped I'd find something I like there. Obviously I'd heard of the Saatchi Collection and the Young British Artists scene in the early 1990's and its gang leader Damien Hirst and I'd followed the brouhaha about shark pickled in formaldehyde and the cut-up cows, but I'd never actually seen any of his work. .
But we'll get on to the art in a minute. First, I can I talk about the building? I don't know where the collection was before, but The County Hall is a terrific space. Its not your usual gallery - with plain white painted walls. Its an interesting building in its own rights, and it doesn't detract from the art on display. In fact it enhances it. Its like a wee warren, with lots of rooms running off it, Each piece is able to be presented in its own private gallery, this works well with for the Damien Hirst pieces, but I don't know if it'll work for bigger installations. There's a lot of art to see and all of it has good explanatory notes to accompany them - I found them extremely useful as a guide to what the artist was trying to say with each work (is this conceptual art?). A lot of it you'll be familiar with already, if only because of the blaze of publicity given to the YBA's and from the hype of prizes such as The Turner Prize. All the biggies are here: Tracy Emin and her Bed (art as self publicity?); Marc Quinn's Self; the absolutely freaky Myra from Marcus Harvey. There are also works by Sara Lucas, Jake and Dinos Chapman and Jenny Saville and of course, Damien Hirst. To mark its opening, the Gallery is putting on a retrospective of the artist most closely associated with Charles Saatchi. Hirst's works explore the biggies: life and death, I particularly loved the butterfly painting: sickly sweet and deadly, the fly installations are very macabre, 'The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living' (or the pickled shark) and 'Away From The Flock' are very obvious symbols of death. There are rooms packed full of medicine cabinets of pills (prolonging life). There are also some spot and spin paintings. I hope a lot of this remains after the retrospective is finished. So what else is there to see? Another 'worth the admission price alone' work is Richard Wilson's 20:50. Walking into it is a giddy experience: the smell of the oil is claustrophobic. You feel as if you're looking down into a vast cavern. And guess who was in the queue behind me to see it? Steve Martin yep, the once funny Hollywood legend  But for me, the absolute knock-out work is by the photographer Richard Billingham. The photographs are from the collection 'Ray's A Laugh'. It is an intimate family album, Ray, Billingham's father, is an alcoholic. His mother, Elizabeth cares for Ray and a menagerie of animals and obviously loves knick-knacks. The photographs aren't contrived, but show a family living their lives, doing what most families do - fighting, falling over and laughing - normal family life. The camera is never instrusive. His photographs hit me on a very personal level. After the contemplations on death from Damien Hirst it was great to find some life in the building. I was slightly disappointed by Tate Modern: most of the art didn't engage me enough, but I found exactly what I was looking for in The Saatchi Gallery. For the most part, artists in the Saatchi Collection are trying to say something about the human condition and about human responses to human problems.
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