Photo credit: © Justin Piperger
Once Upon a Time in London, a fascinating exhibition drawing together modern art inspired by the capital, is showing at Saatchi Yates in nearby St James’ until 17 August.
About
Hosted at the fashionable gallery founded by Phoebe Saatchi Yates and her husband Arthur Yates in 2020, Once Upon a Time in London brings together art from the postwar era to newly commissioned pieces in a celebration of the London art scene. Saatchi explains: “the exhibition traces London’s evolution as a global capital for rule-breaking, genre-defining art.”
The gallery details:
“[The exhibition explores] how the city has evolved but remains a constant beating heart of ground- breaking art. Beginning after WWII, featuring violent, psychologically twisted paintings from modern British masters Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach and Lucian Freud to the golden years of the RCA where America’s influence grows internationally, David Hockney paints a vision of Arizona as pop culture arrives on British shores. In more recent times, the exhibition explores London in the 90s. A generation of graduate artists who didn’t ask for permission, hosting exhibitions of cutting edge conceptual art in abandoned shops and London buildings, embodying the punk spirit of the city. Damien Hirst’s medicine cabinets turn art into a science experiment, painkillers and antidepressants creating artificial emotional responses, or a portrait from Jenny Saville’s graduation show exploring the female figure from entirely new perspectives. More recently works by Lynette Yiadom Boakye brings a new viewpoint to the figurative painting tradition or even more recently Jade Fadoujitimi brings a new energy to abstract painting.
Finally, the exhibition will explore the current community of London artists within this historic context. Artists such as Oli Epp and Benjamin Spiers create masterfully painted surreal portraits that delve deep into the human psyche in a post digital world, Slawn brings post-brexit Nigerian chutzpah to the London scene, rejecting the status quo, his dynamism and force of nature is undeniable. These are just a few of the artists who make up today’s thrilling London scene. Once again we see a new generation of artists challenging the established order, it is this iconoclastic spirit that links our great cities artists over generations.”
Getting there
Saatchi Yates is located at 14 Bury Street in St James’s which is just half a mile from 9 Hertford Street. It can be reached by walking along Piccadilly or taking a bus from Stop D at Old Park Lane.