Contents
- Introduction
- Overview: Painters’ Painters
- Painting and the photograph
- The artists
- Common themes
- Artist websites
Introduction...
The Saatchi Gallery is a contemporary art gallery –all of the
artworks on display are made by artists living and working
today
These artworks are at the cutting edge of contemporary art
Many of these artists have never exhibited in the UK
The Gallery hosts 3-4 new exhibitions per year
Many artists showing at the Saatchi Gallery are unknown
when first exhibited, not only to the general public but also to
the commercial art world
Many of these artists are subsequently offered shows by
galleries and museums internationally. In this effect, the
gallery operates as a springboard for young artists to launch
their careers
Overview: Painters’ Painters
9 present-day painters diverse in age, nationality and approach
In an age where painting has become one strand among many in contemporary art making, Painters’ Painters
brings together a small group of distinctive figures in the field
These artists have been undeterred by the gradual decline in interest in the art form. The place of painting in
the art world today could be seen as both mainstream and niche
There is no discernible style or movement these artists belong to and the exhibition aims to examine the very
individualistic and nonconformist approaches explored by these painters
The artists are proving to be inspirational to a younger generation of artists emerging from the world’s leading
art schools
Are painters less worried about living rivals? Are they more concerned with the enormous weight of all the
great painters that came before them?
Painting and the photograph Paul Delaroche, a French painter, famously announced in 1839 that “From today, painting is dead”. This was in
response to seeing examples of the Daguerreotype- the first successful photographic process. Of course,
painting did not die in 1839. Painters such as Monet, Cezanne, Matisse, Picasso, Pollock, Rothko, Bacon and
Freud, to name but a few, are proof of that.
It would be closer to the truth to say that the invention of photography revived painting rather than killed it,
all of a sudden painters had a new challenge- to create new visual languages that challenged the photograph,
and freed painting from the task of representation, primarily of portraiture.
It is also incorrect to think of painting and photography as always being at odds with one another. The two
disciplines have a long and close association, and many of the artists in Painters’ Painters work with
photography and the printed image.
“The world does not look like a photograph.
The lens sees geometrically and we see
psychologically”
- David Hockney
Today, painting is both mainstream & niche:
- Mainstream in that it is one of the earliest & most important
art forms, practised by mankind from the very beginning
- Niche in that it could be seen to have fallen from favour in
the art world- are other art forms perceived as responding
to contemporary society in a more relevant way?
The Artists
Richard Aldrich
Raffi Kalenderian
Martin Maloney Ryan Mosely
David Brian Smith
Dexter Dalwood
Ansel Krut
Bjarne Melgaard
David Salle
• Born in 1981, Los Angeles
• Lives and works in LA
• Work primarily in portraiture
• Uses watercolours, graphite and
coloured pencils, sometimes
combined in collage with found
photocopied materials
• Paints close friends and family in
intimate settings
• Prefers to work from life
• Use of bold lines and solid areas
of colour allude to a graphic way
of painting
• His work is a reminder that
painting is inseparable from
drawing
• The intense pattern and lack of
perspective create an almost
claustrophobic scene
• Figures blend into their
backgrounds, becoming as
inanimate as the objects around
them
• He uses this restrained medium
to comment on the self-centred
confinement of today’s society
• Although the paintings are of
people he knows well, the
figures are often depicted in stiff,
awkward positions
Raffi Kalenderian [gallery 1]
Above: Rachel, 2007, oil on canvas, 213.4 x
121.9cm
Top right: Dasha (Chelsea Hotel), 2013, oil on
canvas, 213 x 264cm
Bottom right: Spirit Guides and Sunflowers,
2008, oil on canvas, 152.4 x 248.9cm
Artwork in focus: Highlanders 2008
Oil on canvas (triptych)
213.4 x 137.2 cm each panel
• Highlanders is a triptych of three panel paintings, each portraying a person sitting in
a plastic lawn chair on a porch overlooking a vast and oddly green LA landscape
• Ominous black clouds hang in the huge sky above them in fat swirls
• In Kalenderian’s world, even the sky becomes as tangible as a chair
• Most of Kalenderian’s protagonists are depicted in full-length portraits in domestic
settings, the works’ titles giving us their first names only
• Kalenderian’s backgrounds present an almost claustrophobic closure
• This is due primarily to a simple visual trick that reinforces a ‘faulty’ perspective: at
times, elements our perception would register as being further away are shown at
the same scale as motifs in the foreground
• As a result, background spaces are reduced to a two-dimensional "curtain" and the
figures appear as though placed in front of drapery or stock backdrop in a
photography studio
Associated artist: Edward
Hopper
Kalenderian’s work has been compared to
that of American painter Edward Hopper’s, in
his depiction of the ‘solitary American’ in
interior spaces.
L-R, Western Motel, 1957, oil on canvas
Room in New York, 1932, oil on canvas
Richard Aldrich [gallery 2]
• Born in 1975, USA
• Lives and works in New York
• He started out as a poet &
writer, also experimented
with electronic music
• His work does not seem to
move in a particular
direction- it navigates its way
through different styles and
back again
• The paintings he made
around 2003 were small by
necessity (Future Portrait
#49)- he made them in his
basement studio in which he
could barely stand up. He
had to paint them on a table
or on his lap
• Often works on gessoed
panels with a mixture of oil
paint, mineral spirits and
wax, which he lays on with a
brush or palette knife
• He often adds objects that
he finds lying around his
studio, for example bits of
wood
Future Portrait #49, 2003, acrylic on panel, 30.5 x
30.5cm
Past, Present and Future (#1), 2009, oil, wax, matte medium,
charcoal, cut linen, plant
213.4 x 147.3cm
Aldrich describes his practice as “working out the
relationships between objects in time and space,
be it a blank canvas, an empty room or spans of
time”.
Dexter Dalwood [gallery 3]• Born in 1960, Bristol, UK
• Lives and works in London
• He left school at 16 to pursue a
career in music
• He discovered painting in the late
70s and he says “a light came on”
• Being alone in a room making a
mess is what first attracted him to
painting
• He studied at Central St Martins
and the Royal College of Art
• He was shortlisted for the Turner
Prize in 2010
• He works first in collage to depict
the scenes, borrowing images
from other paintings, magazines,
photographs, newspapers, the
internet. He then reassembles
them as flat, bright acrylic
paintings
• His paintings depict imagined
places, often interiors, belonging
to a real person- always famous
and usually dead
• They often depict the scene of a
famous incident or event
• The figures are always absent- as
if they are “off-set”. The viewer is
required to fill in the blanks
“I am obsessive about looking at and making
paintings. The viewer must use their imagination
to complete my images, so I create images that
trigger memories, or play upon images they may
have already have in mind about certain
events.”
Kurt Cobain’s Greenhouse, 2000, oil on canvas, 214 x 258cm
Brian Jones’ Swimming Pool, 2000, oil on canvas, 275
x 219cm
Artwork in focus: Grosvenor Square 2002
Oil on canvas
268 x 347 cm
• Depicts an open space outside the American Embassy
in London in 1969
• This was during the time of demonstrations against the
Vietnam War
• The diversity of his source material is such that for this
piece he layered together a photographic source, a motif
from a contemporary painter and an imagined landscape
of his own
• He began with a small Polaroid photograph of the statue
of Franklin D.Roosevelt
• He added trees from Georg Baselitz’s paintings, in their
trademark upside-down form (right)
• Then he added an “invented autumn wistful lawn with
fallen leaves”
He recreates landscapes and
interiors that the viewer may
feel they are already familiar
with from collective knowledge
formed from media history. He
combines this with art
historical references.
Georg Baselitz, The Forest Upside Down,
1969, oil on canvasHe is concerned that painting as a medium has the potential to give everything away too quickly, especially
when compared with other contemporary disciplines such as performance, film or video- which require a
commitment of time- or even sculpture, for which a viewer must move through the physical space in order to
completely ‘take in’ the work. Painting, in contrast, is fully contained within its edges, and even the largest of
canvases can be consumed with a cursory glance.
To combat this, his paintings aim to slow down the viewer. He creates carefully balanced compositions, his
paintings offering no immediate resting point for the eye. Recognisable objects or familiar motifs hint at
connections between diverse parts and the works become a puzzle to be solved- a reward for the viewer who is
willing to take the time to pause, look and think.
Martin Maloney [gallery 4]• Born 1961, London
• Lives and works in London
• Cheery, apparently naïve,
depiction of people
• This group of paintings were
made in 2004
• Maloney’s studio assistant
posed for all of the figures-
“she was like a prop to make
the paintings around”
• He would then add an
invented background- a
mixture of observation and
invention
• The mundane becomes a
cause for fascination in his
paintings
• The clueless characters
seem to surround themselves
with props: a TV set, a cat, a Walkman
• The objects’ utility however is
discarded in favour of their
decorative appeal- everything
remains on the surface
• It appears to be a fantasy
projection of a child trying to
imagine his or her grown up
life
“We’ve lived through 150 years of people draining colour from our lives.
People think that colour is light-hearted, not serious. But what’s the
opposite? Gloom, doom- why would anyone want that?”
Stroller, 2004, oil on canvas, 260 x 231cm Saplings, 2004, oil on canvas, 244 x 213cm
Sources of inspiration… “David Hockney, Alex Katz, Willem
De Kooning, Picasso, Bonnard, you think about different
things on different days. When you make something, you may
suddenly find a connection that you didn’t think was there”
Willem de Kooning, Woman V, 1952–53,
oil, enamel, and charcoal on canvas
Top right: Alex Katz,
Katherine & Elizabeth,
2012, oil on linen
Left: David Hockney,
The Conversation,
1980, oil on canvas
Right: Pierre Bonnard,
The Toilet, 1932, oil
on canvas
David Salle [gallery 5]
Salle’s work is a reshuffle of existing things. The
title of his painting Picture Builder alludes to
this, while Angels in the Rain collates funerary
statues, performing bears on bicycles, swirling
lines- plus a fish, a candlestick, fruit and a giant
shell, which might come from a 17th century
Dutch still life.
• Born in 1952, Oklahoma,
USA
• Lives and works in New
York
• Bases his paintings on
motifs from art history,
advertisements, design,
everyday culture and his
own photography
• His work is a matter of
putting together “different
elements taken from here
and there”
• His paintings have
included allusions to
Velaquez, Bernini,
Cezanne, Giacometti and
Magritte
• There is a sense of
transparency in his
paintings- they appear to
have openings, space you
can pass through
• He also works in
performance and has
worked with famous
choreographers to create
sets and costumes for
ballets and operas
• He is a prolific writer on art
Angels In The Rain, 1998, acrylic and oil on canvas and linen, 244 x 335 cm
Picture Builder, 1993, acrylic and oil on canvas, 213 x 290 cm
“Artists are basically looking for things they
can use. Is there anything to admire? Or,
is there anything I have to worry about?
The images I use in my work are specific;
they’re not random. They’re not from all
over the place; they’re from certain places”
Ansel Krut [gallery 6]
• Born in 1959, Cape Town, South
Africa
• Lives and works in London
• Initially he painted in a classical
style before becoming interested in
a more anarchic subject matter
• Krut’s technique is to construct the
surfaces of his canvases with
layers of colourful oil paint
• Krut uses the juxtaposition of
seemingly random subject matter to
build a sense of contradiction in his
work
• Practices ‘picture painting’, taking
inspiration from both classical
portraiture and cartooning as a way
of reconciling these conflicting
traditions
• Views cartoons as just as important
as any other art historical genre
• Although often regarded as tongue-
in-cheek and playful, his work also
addresses serious political issues,
such as the Apartheid in South
Africa
• Krut first works out the images as
sketches, then introduces colour
before finally translating the image
into a painting
“Everything is turned on its head. And in a
way I want to make images that don’t allow
you to settle on any certainties. Often you
start looking at a picture and then you find
the carpet has been pulled from under your
feet”
“All of my paintings are about
some kind of confrontation or
engagement with the viewer. The
character is looking out at you, not
challenging exactly, but it’s asking
you to deal with its strangeness”
Head with Bottles, 2008, oil on canvas, 76 x 61cm
Little Fry-Up, 2006, oil on canvas, 41 x 30cm
Artwork in focus: Napoleon On Elba2008
Oil on canvas
100 x 100 cm
• Inspired by Ingres’s stately portrait Napoleon on his Imperial
Throne (1806)
• The original made him think of toilet paper- perhaps it was
the voluminous ermine and white of the Emperor’s robes
• He recycled this image of glorified political dominance as a
lavatorial still life. He bought some cheap toilet paper, which
posed in his studio, in place of the mighty ruler in his glory
• By rendering Naopleon as stacked loo rolls, Krut is reflecting
on the absurdity of official portraits
• The muted tones relate to the density or materiality of the
paint itself, which looks slightly digested as if it has run
through some sort of system
Associated artists
• Cubists and Futurists
• Turn-of-the-century still life paintings depicting collections of
vegetables and orifices
• Krut is a leading practitioner of what might be termed
"cartoon noir," a genre that includes New York-based artist
Joyce Pensato and Armenian-born, London-based Armen
Eloyan
• Philip Guston (also Cartoon Noir)
Bjarne Melgaard [gallery 7]
• Born 1967, Sydney,
Australia to Norwegian
parents
• Raised in Norway
• Lives and works in New
York
• He has been described as
the most internationally
prominent Norwegian
artist since Edvard Munch
• His works and exhibitions
have sparked controversy
due to references to
subversive subcultures
• This resulted in the
closure of one of his
exhibitions
• He is also interested in
activist art
• His artwork relates to his
extensive writings,
including the many novels
he has written
• Melgaard also works in
sculpture, performance
and installation
Above: Untitled, Fear of Les Super, 2007, oil on canvas, 200 x 300cm
Left (top): Untitled, 2007, oil on canvas, 180 x 180cm
Left (bottom): Untitled, 2007, oil on canvas, 180 x 180cm
“You need to reinvent yourself all the time- that’s
where you get your energy from…it’s important for
me to move between different areas of
professionalism, from very low-key galleries to an
upper-class Manhattan gallery…I don’t want to
communicate to the same audiences all the time”
Melgaard, Munch and Basquiat
Edvard Munch was a prolific yet perpetually troubled artist
preoccupied with matters of human mortality such as chronic illness,
sexual liberation and religious aspiration. He expressed these
obsessions through works of intense colour, semi-abstraction and
mysterious subject matter. Bjarne Melgaard has been likened to
Munch as both artists are concerned with themes of sexuality, gender,
death, loneliness and alienation. They both deal with these central
experiences encountered by the human being in modern society, yet
set against the backdrop of their own times.
Edvard MunchThe Scream, 1893, oil, tempera and
pastel on cardboard
“I was walking down the road
with two friends when the sun
set; suddenly, the sky turned as
red as blood. I stopped and
leaned against the fence...
shivering with fear. Then I
heard the enormous, infinite
scream of nature”.
Jean-Michel BasquiatDustheads, 1982
acrylic, oil stick, spray enamel and metallic paint on canvas
Formally, Melgaard has close links to the American artist Jean
Michel Basquiat, whose visually-shrieking colours and bold paint marks make the eyes dance and dart across the canvas. Both
artists use black contours, filled-in and coloured fields and built-up
areas of paint versus thin and exacting lines. Their works feature
cartoon-like characters and hold a false sense of naivety.
Ryan Mosley [gallery 8] • Born in 1980, Chesterfield,
UK
• Lives and works in London
UK
• Having previously worked as
a security guard at the
National Gallery, the
traditional paintings left a
lasting impression on him. He
could often be found
sketching them in secret
whilst at work
• Mosely’s paintings are often
developments originating
from small illustrations jotted
down in his notebook
• His father was an engineer
and Mosley attributes his
enthusiasm for painting to his
father’s technical drawings
• His paintings relate to notions
of carnival and the grotesque
• He invents and choreographs
strange characters
• He notes the importance of
mistakes in his work, instead
of erasing them he uses them
to organically develop the
piece and take on new,
unexpected forms
“I only ever paint for myself. As selfish
as it sounds, they are paintings I want to
make and want to look at. When the
audience engage with the paintings I
find it fascinating that an individual will
bring to it their own readings and
interpretations”
Piano Tuners, 2011, oil on canvas, 220 x 190cm
Emperor Butterfly, 2007, oil on linen, 160 x 180cm
Artwork in focus: Empress Butterfly2007
Oil on linen
200 x 180cm
• Empress Butterfly was conceived as a partner painting to
Emperor Butterfly (as seen on previous slide)
• Layering of drawings with a paint brush and painterly
gestures presents a figure with multiple limbs
• All the weight is on one knuckle as if the foetal figure is a
chrysalis in transformation
• The characters in both paintings evolved from the
paintings in Mosley’s degree show which was about the
celebratory nature of a carnival
• “It’s like a pseudo religious character or a mythic
anthropomorphic figure” Mosley describes
• There is no preconceived notion of what any painting will
become. Each one is an act of discovery
“I’m drawn to other painters
that tend to deal with the
figure or anatomy, as that is
something we all have in
common as human beings”
Above right:
Dana Shutz, Reformers, 2004, oil on canvas,
190.5 x 231 cm
Bottom, L-R:
R B Kitaj, The Autumn of Central Paris (after
Walter Benjamin) 1972-3, Oil on canvas 60 x 60
in
Philip Guston, The Studio, 1969, oil on canvas,
121.9 x 106.7 cm
James Ensor, Strange Masks, 1892, oil on
canvas
David Brian Smith [gallery 10]• Born in 1981,
Wolverhampton, UK
• Lives and works in London
• He was raised on a farm in
Shropshire
• The landscapes in his
paintings are inspired by the
British countryside
• His paintings derive from
family photographs taken by
his great-grandfather, a
clergyman living in India
• His use of photography is
more poetic than it is literal- it
is a way of entering a lost
world
• Each painting takes one
month to complete
• He begins each painting with
a simple composition and
very little is planned in
advance
• It has been said that there is
an ‘unfamiliar’ feel to his
paintings, which he likes
“When I begin a new body of work, I limit my colour pallet. Recently eight paintings have
gone on show at the Albert Baronian Gallery in Brussels. I began the process of making this
work with the colours yellow, orange and blue in mind. This helps me when I get stuck and
creates a coherency throughout the body of paintings and ultimately the exhibition”
Great Expectations- Wow, 2010, oil on
herringbone linen, 180 x 150cm
Great Expectations- A Windy Day, 2015, oil on linen, 220 x 270cm
“Van Gogh and David Salle were early influences. When I’m
working on a new body of work I don’t like to see painting shows”
Vincent Van Gogh, Road with Cypress and Star,
1890, oil on canvas
Vincent Van Gogh, Landscape with Olive Trees,
1889, oil on canvas
David Brian Smith, My Soul Hath a Remembrance and Is
Humbled In Me II, 2011, oil on herringbone linen, 180 x 150cm
“In the collection of paintings at the Saatchi Gallery, three of the figures are of a shepherd that I’ve never met. My mother sent me an image of
that shepherd amongst a flock of sheep. She found the image in a newspaper, hidden under a carpet in her home that she moved to after selling
the farm in 2006, with some pressed flowers in it! The image was in a Sunday express from 1933 and was there to commemorate the armistice.
She sent it to me because it’s a lovely photo but more significantly, because my father died in late 2005 and he was a shepherd, it seemed to sum
up where we were at that time. This series is always entitled Great Expectations.
In My Soul Hath a Remembrance and is Humbled In Me II, I became the shepherd”.
Common themes• Popular culture, mass media and the Internet (Dexter Dalwood, David Salle)
• Appropriation of images (David Brian Smith, Dexter Dalwood, Ansel Krut, David Salle, David Brian Smith)
• Use of historical sources/traditions (David Brian Smith, Dexter Dalwood, Ansel Krut, Ryan Mosley, David Salle)
• Abstraction and space (Richard Aldrich, Ansel Krut, Ryan Mosley)
• Rural life and nature (David Brian Smith, Dexter Dalwood)
• City life (Dexter Dalwood, Martin Maloney)
• A national identity (Dexter Dalwood, David Brian Smith, Martin Maloney)
• The everyday/ mundane (Dexter Dalwood, Raffi Kalenderian, Martin Maloney)
• Celebrity culture (Dexter Dalwood)
• Sub cultures (Bjarne Melgaard, Ryan Mosley)
• Portraiture (David Brian Smith, Raffi Kalenderian, Ansel Krut, Martin Maloney)
• “Bad” art/ naïve art (Martin Maloney, Bjarne Melgaard)
• Absence (Richard Aldrich, David Brian Smith, Dexter Dalwood)
• Death and mortality (David Brian Smith, Bjarne Melgaard)
• Familiarity / Unfamiliarity (David Brian Smith, Dexter Dalwood, Martin Maloney)
• Social/ political unrest (Bjarne Melgaard)
• Found objects and the ready-made (Richard Aldrich)
• The absurd (Ansel Krut, Ryan Mosley)
Artist websites
Richard Aldrich
bortolamigallery.com
David Brian Smith
davidbriansmith.com
Dexter Dalwood
dexterdalwood.com
Raffi Kalendrian
peterkilchmann.com
Ansel Krut
modernart.net
Martin Maloney
saatchigallery.com
Bjarne Melgaard
bjarnemelgaard.com
Ryan Mosley
alisonjacquesgallery.com
David Salle
davidsallestudio.net