- Venue
- Saatchi Gallery
- Location
Photography is the strong point. Vikenti Nilin’s series Neighbours are stunning, catching a strange equilibrium where people are balanced, and seemingly at ease, in the most precarious edges of their apartments. You can read politics into them, a physiological state or a depth of despair somehow shared by all humans, and also pure notions of photography and the relationship with the photographer and the image – just where is the photographer? What is the back story? How did Nilin persuade his subjects to give him these moments? Impossible images taken from impossible angles, and yet we can all understand them.
Boris Mikhailov’s photographs, Case History 1997-1998, are almost unbearable. Think the candid photographs of Richard Billingham, but with more tumours, nudity and snow. It’s the unremitting, irredeemable squalor that makes you swear inwardly as you file past this documentation of people in a Ukrainian town lost to poverty and alcohol.
Sculptor Nika Neelova delivers the promise of the eloquent title Scaffolds Today, Monuments Tomorrow. Janis Avotins’ untitled paintings places isolated suggestions within a shadowy wash of colour.
From this and previous exhibitions I’ve seen at Saatchi I conclude that the Saatchi taste favours punchline art – art that advertises itself as art. This means that it does not favour art that subtly infiltrates, or spreads itself out, accumulates or is too abstracted. This immediacy of impact often does follow through with residual layers of meaning, but it is undeniably a particular style of delivery which does not encompass all artistic practice. I remember strong opinions from during my art degree which considered Saatchi a %^$£^ and thought he had skewed the entire face of art and ruined the idea of art practice from a lifetime’s aim reduced to a snappy business. It’s hard to put a foot down firmly in either camp, as there are so many variables, but at least he is one collector who publicly exhibits works for free.
