Our class went on a trip to the Saatchi gallery, in purpose to research the artists/get inspired by the work presented there. In the gallery, we've seen the work of many different artists such as:
Zak Smith:
"Girls in the naked business: Sasha Grey" (acrylic and metallic ink on paper)
"Things i drew and pinned to the wall" (Acrylic on paper)
This artist's style in usually collage-like, a collection of many images and subjects painted onto paper. His work usually portray controversial, sex-related things and people and are created in a pop-art style, visually similar to Richard Hamilton.
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Marcelo Jacome:
"Planos-pipas n17" (Tissue paper, bamboo, fiberglass and cotton thread)
"Planos pipas" in the artist's native language, Portuguese, mean "kite-planes" and the art work is made of of the same traditional materials the kite planes are made. The bright, contrasting colours could represent the nature of childhood (of the artist) as well as the creative, unusual and imaginative shapes it is made out of.
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Sean Dack
"Jigsaw" (Digital C-print)
CCTV #2 (Digital C-print)
Dack creates highly digital, modern-looking prints using mostly photoshop - pixelasation, montage, filters, blurs etc. The purpose of his work is not to present the image as a faithful, exact copy of the object being photographed like in the traditional photography, but to show it in a complete different way. Sean Dack’s work operates within that murky territory of photographic unfaithfulness, taking as its source images that really ought to co-operate, like CCTV footage.
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Gerald Davis
"Fagboy 1986" (coloured pencil on paper)
Gerald Davis' work called "Fagboy 1986" has an autobiographical basis: as a child, Davis dreamed of becoming an animator, inspired by Disney. However, drawing being his hobby seemed weird to his brother and his friends, and the name "fag" (meaning gay/outsider) stuck to him back then. The work represents the nature of bullying, misconceptions and gender-based stereotyping that still happens in our days.
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Jessica Jackson Hutchins
"Couch for a long time" (Couch, newspaper, ceramic)
The title of Couch for a Long Time, is a mixed media sculpture is made out of various made and found objects - ceramics, newspaper, re-cycled old couch. The meaning of the piece is based around time: how it passes and is being wasted by humans. Ceramic pots and sculptures seem to sit on the couch like people and waste their time on recieving various information from the media. The newspaper pieces are mostly articles about politics and the current US president - Obama, implying how much information we recieve about the politics and that our lives are very much influenced by the government.
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Han Feng
"Floating City" (Tracing paper (laser print) and fish tackle thread)
Feng's piece, "Floating City" is what i consider as very original to the rest of the things we've seen in the exhibition: composed of hundreds of tracing paper buildings of various sizes, their laser- printed details deriving from images of city architecture, which are grouped in dense clusters and hung from the ceiling with transparent fish tackle thread. Its neither a sculpture, drawing or a painting and it combines the digital media (laser printing) with hand-made art.
The piece is hovering a few inches off the gallery floor, looking almost dream-like. Depicting a city – something we associate, especially in recent times, with population density, atmospheric pollution, architectural diversity and multicultural vibrancy – as something weightless, depopulated, semi-transparent and fragile, Feng’s work asks us to consider the city as something imagined, an idea as much as a place. This might be what a utopia looks like – a notion expressed in language, impossible to realise in reality.
