Newspeak: British Art Now Part II

Earlier this week I was at the Saatchi Gallery to see Part 2 of Newspeak: British Art Now. Having appreciated the first part of Newspeak, it was encouraging to see that the standard of work remained high in part 2 and that painting continued to feature strongly. These are the artists that caught my attention:

• Juliana Cerqueira Leite: Leite's work is driven by an investigation into physicality and how we interact with the physical world. Oh came from thinking about physics: what would our bodies look like if time didn’t separate our actions? She traced the area around her as far as she could reach without moving her feet and made an object that would materialise that space. She sees it as a volume defined by the potential of touch.
• Jonathan Wateridge: Wateridge thinks of his work in relation to cinematography; composing realistic but fictional images. These are paintings that play on a sense of the familiar - our understanding and consumption of archetypal or generic images - by way of a B-movie aesthetic meeting the Sublime.
• Tessa Farmer: Made from desiccated insect remains, dried plant roots, and other organic ephemera, Farmer’s Swarm references Damien Hirst while envisioning the purveyors of mischief and magic (fairies) as an actual species, as animalistic and Darwinian as any other to create a microscopic apocalypse.
• Dan Perfect: Perfect says that his paintings are like imagined interiors or psychological landscapes; stage sets or dramatic scenes from video games. They are re-imagined experiences, a decayed science fiction where tumultuous change and biological entropy is intervened and radically altered. Everything is partial in these paintings: masks, costumes, body parts, animals that are human, humans that are animals, things are taken apart and exploded.
• David Brian Smith: Smith's Great Expectations - Wow takes a picture of a Shepherd tending his flock found in a newspaper from the 1930s and uses the image to jump between different styles of painting to reinvent the space, light and palette within the picture. 
• Anne Hardy: Hardy’s photographs picture depopulated rooms that suggest surreal fictions allowing our relationship with them to be in our imagination.
• Anna Barriball: Barriball covers the surfaces of everyday objects so they become seductively sinister husks of their former selves unveiling a mystery in the domestic and familiar. Door is a drawing that assumes the qualities of a sculpture. Its burnished graphite surface captures every subtle detail of the original object, while the paper warps and fluxes through repetitive handling to gain a solidity of its own. Black Wardrobe becomes a monumental void connoting absence and memory.
• Idris Khan: Khan compiles single super-images by digitally layering and super-imposition of multiple images of industrial subjects giving the effect of an impressionistic drawing or blurred film still. The effect is of a soft ethereal energy conveys a sense of time depicted in motion. They exude a transfixing spiritual quality in their densely compacted details and ghostly outlines.
• Clarisse d’Arcimoles: d'Arcimoles' series consists of a photograph from her family album and a picture of the same person taken in 2009 in a scene that’s been exactly reproduced creating a way back to childhood, even if just for a short instant. d'Arcimoles says, "We were all children once, and that is something that is always current within us ... By creating these kinds of comparisons, or rather confrontations, I felt like I was exploring time in its oddest form – as if there was a dialogue between the past and the present moment."

Confessions of Dangerous Minds, showing at the Phillips de Pury & Company galleries at the Saatchi Gallery in London, features 19 established and exciting up and coming artists to explore the breadth, depth and diversity of Turkey’s visual arts. Here I particularly liked:

• Yasam Sasmazer’s works feature figurative sculpture of children or ‘little people’. Made to confess something seemingly naughty, there is something uncanny in the fantastic world the artist creates, a feeling that we all remember from our childhood.
• Ebru Uygun embraces a minimalist and abstract approach to painting; concentrating on colour, form and space. The artist adopts a technique by which she combines torn strips of canvas into a new single work, each strip forms a piece of the work in an dazzling accumulation of colour and pattern.
• In Ramazan Bayrakoglu's works, the viewers’ first impression comes from the image seen through the use of satin cloth or plexiglass. As viewers visualise the material and the subject together, the meaning of the work is ultimately understood; the result is a comparison of various works and the different feelings evoked in the audience.

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