LONDON.- On 2 June, the
Saatchi Gallery will open its largest show since moving to Chelsea. Entitled Newspeak: British Art Now, the exhibition will feature some of the most exciting artists to have emerged in the UK in the last few years who are still largely unknown in the wider art world.
Over a decade after Sensation and the advent of the YBAs, this new generation of artists are making work that collectively offers an arresting insight into the future of contemporary art in Britain. In Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, Newspeak is "the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year"; this exhibition turns that Orwellian vision on its head, showing that the range of visual languages being exploited and invented by these artists is in fact expanding and multiplying. Through sculpture, painting, photography and installation, they explore issues such as class, consumerism and the phenomenon of instant success culture, often with a distinctly British dry wit.
A selection of works from the exhibition were shown at The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg in October 2009, including Eugenie Scrase's Truncated Trunk, chosen from the BBC2 series School of Saatchi, which aired last autumn.
Newspeak: British Art Now - Part I features a selection of works by Hurvin Anderson, Jonathan Baldock, Karla Black, Lynette Yiadom Boakye, Pablo Bronstein, Steven Claydon, William Daniels, Matthew Darbyshire, Tim Ellis, Sigrid Holmwood, Iain Hetherington, Scott King, littlewhitehead, Alastair MacKinven, Goshka Macuga, Ryan Mosley, Rupert Norfolk, Mark Pearson, Peter Peri, Ged Quinn, Clunie Reid, Barry Reigate, Eugenie Scrase, Daniel Silver, Fergal Stapleton, Clare Stephenson, Phoebe Unwin, Donald Urquhart and John Wynne.
In October 2008, the Saatchi Gallery re-opened in the 70,000 sq. ft Duke of Yorks HQ building on Kings Road in the heart of London. With free admission to all shows, the Saatchi Gallery aims to bring contemporary art to the widest audience possible. The first two exhibitions, The Revolution Continues: New Art from China and Unveiled: New Art from the Middle East, have ranked as first and third most visited shows in the UK in The Art Newspapers survey of 2009 attendance figures, and the Saatchi Gallery has attracted over 1.2 million visitors in its first year since relocating to Chelsea.