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Saatchi Gallery

  • Art
  • Chelsea
ART_SaatchiGallery_CREDIT_EmmaWood_TOpic.jpg
© Emma WoodSaatchi Gallery
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Time Out says

Charles Saatchi's gallery, which opened after numerous delays in October 2008, has three floors, providing more than 70,000sq ft of space for temporary exhibitions. Given his fame as a promoter in the 1990s of what became known as the Young British Artists – Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, Gavin Turk, Sarah Lucas et al – it surprised many that the opening exhibition was of new Chinese art. Since then Saatchi Gallery – housed in the historically significant Duke of York HQ – has continued its mission to provide a platform for unknown, young, contemporary artists both homegrown and international.

Details

Address:
Duke of York's HQ
Duke of York's HQ
King's Rd
London
SW3 4RY
Transport:
Tube: Sloane Square
Price:
Free
Opening hours:
10am-6pm Mon-Sun
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What’s on

Edward Burtynsky: 'Extraction/Abstraction'

  • 4 out of 5 stars

The guts of society are hidden away, but Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky has spent his long career eviscerating them and putting them on display. All the things that make modern life tick – the mines for our batteries, the farms for our food, the abattoirs for our meat – are kept secret, out of view because they lay bare the damage we’re doing to the planet. Burtynsky’s vast, mega-scale photographs here at the Saatchi Gallery (there’s a concurrent, free, smaller show of his work at Flowers Gallery too) drag those private shames out into the open. He photographs salt marshes carving up the Spanish coastline, gold mines spilling cyanide into the Johannesburg’s groundwater, circular crops sucking Saudi Arabia’s aquifers dry, diamond mines leaking toxic waste into the hills of South Africa. It would make for grim viewing if it wasn’t all so beautiful. Burtynsky finds the sublime in the vile, he highlights the washes of hyper-saturated colour in criss-crossing striated hills and planes, the geometric composition of riverbeds and salt lakes. Everything is pushed to such an extreme – in size and colour – and so rich in aesthetic detail that it looks more abstract than anything real could ever be. It’s not beautiful, it’s actually toxic and damaging and bad And that’s his trick. The work lulls you into a state of awe at all the beauty of the world, and then big Ed runs in to bash you over the head with a baseball bat while yelling ‘wrong! It’s not beautiful, it’s actually tox

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