The Saatchi Gallery is 40 years old. To celebrate they are staging this big, varied, confusing, uneven and sometimes stunning exhibition of recent and contemporary art. It showcases some 100 works by nearly 50 artists, including new works by some of the iconic artists long associated with the Gallery (such as Damien Hirst and Jenny Saville, Gavin Turk and Jake Chapman), alongside works from a new, younger generation.
Installation view of room 2 in The Long Now at the Saatchi Gallery, showing the Jenny Saville painting at the end and a Polly Morgan sculpture on the wall on the right (photo by the author)
The curators have divided the pieces up into ten sections, each with a distinct theme. The themes reflect concepts which have underpinned exhibitions throughout the Saatchi Gallery’s 40-year existence, and are:
- Mark making
- Lyrical abstraction
- Reverb
- Inner landscape
- The Yard
- Circulation-Refraction
- Post-human
- Bardo
- Exposed
- 20:50
But having gone round the exhibition twice, it dawned on me that it’s actually a show of two halves. What I mean is that, varied and often very good though many of the earlier works are, the show feels like it leads up, in the second half, from The Yard onwards, to a succession of large and dazzling installations. These are so striking as to risk overwhelming the earlier, more traditional or modestly sized works. For this review I’ll cut across the themes to divide them up by media or format.
Painting
The curators are at pains to emphasise that the Saatchi Gallery has always had a special commitment to painting, and so the show includes works by leading contemporary painters like Alex Katz, Michael Raedecker, Ansel Krut, Martine Poppe and Jo Dennis. The first room contains one of the most striking paintings, ‘Chance Composition 206’ by Alice Anderson, which dominates by dint of its sheer size. Anderson paints found objects and scatters them across the surface of the canvas, sometimes in the course of dances, and her work apparently references everything from Indigenous dances to quantum physics. What comes over is it’s big and dynamic and exciting.
Installation of The Long Now at the Saatchi Gallery showing ‘Chance Composition 206’ by Alice Anderson (photo by Matt Chung)
The obvious comparison is with the Abstract Expressionism of Jackson Pollock but Anderson does feel, on closer examination, distinctly different. Even after all these years, I still like the drama of seeing the thick congealed daubs and brushstrokes of paint on the canvas, something which thrilled me at the Van Gogh/Anselm Kiefer exhibition.
Detail of ‘Composition 206’ by Alice Anderson in the Long Now at the Saatchi Gallery (photo by the author)
There were lots of subtler works which I don’t have time to linger on, but the other really striking painting in the show is a characteristically enormous portrait by Jenny Saville, ‘Passage’ from 2004.
Installation view of ‘Passage’ by Jenny Saville (2004) in The Long Now at the Saatchi Gallery (photo by Matt Chung)
As you’ll remember from my review of the recent Saville show at the National Portrait Gallery, Saville has triumphantly shown that painting, portrait painting, and nude painting are still very viable formats. As usual the small flat reproduction in this review in no way conveys the energy and excitement of the paint, of seeing first-hand the dynamic swathes and strokes of paint across the canvas.
Obviously the subject matter is that obsession of so many modern artists and curators, gender. In this case the subject is a transvestite with – if I understand the notes right – a ‘natural penis’ and artificial boobs. No doubt he or she is being brave and speaking their truth and being seen etc etc. For me, though, none of that’s very interesting; the magical, riveting thing is the way great daubs of paint on a flat surface can convey weight and shape and heft and character. She really is a painter of staggering genius.
Sculpture
But it was easy to breeze past a lot of the paintings and not give them the time they require because there were so many more funky distracting sculptures. Born in 1973, Jo Dennis is Scottish. Her big (three and a half metres tall) work, ‘Mother’, is constructed from steel frames supporting found material including tent canvas, yarn and the artist’s own clothes, which are them spray painted. I liked it very much, its presence and shape and dynamic. Without touching it you can feel the roughness of the material, and the whole thing has an imposing totemic presence.
‘Mother’ by Jo Dennis (2025) in The Long Now at the Saatchi Gallery (photo by the author)
This second room had a bunch of fun and funky sculptures including works by Olivia Bax, born 1988 in Singapore, which use chicken wire and metal frames as the basis for angular, metallic, wood, clay and plastic pieces, which I liked very much.
Installation view of The Long Now at the Saatchi Gallery (photo by Matt Chung)
In the same room is a clutch of works by Polly Morgan. Born in 1980, the interesting thing about Morgan is she had no formal art training and is self taught. She uses the skins of real snakes, paints and decorates them, then stuffs and coils them within boxes made from polystyrene packing. Striking, aren’t they? Clever idea, lovely designs.
Two coiled snake works by Polly Morgan in The Long Now at the Saatchi Gallery
Photography
There were a handful of works by photographers. By far the most striking is this pastiche of John Everett Millais’s famous painting of Ophelia in the water, recreated in a pool in Hackney not far from a railway line. It comes from a massive series of photos of Hackney taken by English photographer Tom Hunter. Some of these were published in a beautiful book in 2012 and you can read his introductory essay to it online.
From ‘The Way Home’ by Tom Hunter (2000)
Other notable photos include:
- a characteristically beautiful shot of an open cast coal mine by Edward Burtynsky, shown from far above by a drone camera in such a way as to convert it into an abstract work of art
- a photo by Jeff McMillan of a long low shed in a desert with six big coloured canvases hung on it, the idea being that the pieces weather naturally in the elements before being displayed in the gallery
Rock star art
A special mention for a work by a bona fide rock star, John Squire. Born in 1962, Squire is famous as the guitarist in the Manchester band The Stone Roses, who lit up the rock firmament with their trippy sound in 1989 and ’90. In case you’ve never heard them, this is what they sounded like. Note Squire’s wonderful, transcendent guitar work, combining gutsy rock chords with shimmering arpeggios.
Anyway, back in the reverential silence of the art world, after their brief glorious career the Roses petered out and Squire took to art. He’s had numerous exhibitions, has his own website and is represented in this show by a big attractive work titled ‘The Way Things Aren’t’. In this series he used editing software to alter online images and then recreates them as paintings. As the title rather obviously indicates, these cut up-and-pasted, refracted-through-three-media images are intended to reflect the post-truth, fake news digital world we all now inhabit – but the point, as always, is the striking impact of the work itself, the intriguing (or disturbing?) interplay of the multiple fingers against the Twiggy-style wide eyes…
Installation view of ‘The Way Things Aren’t’ by John Squire (2018) in The Long Now at the Saatchi Gallery (photo by Matt Chung)
The installations
The problem with The Long Now, if problem it is, is that the subtlety and variety of many of the works, many of the paintings and sculptures in the earlier galleries, is rather swamped by what comes next, a sequence of big, loud, installations in the middle and later galleries.
YARD and Golden Lotus
It begins with the final gallery on the first floor of the exhibition. This contains two installations which are dramatic enough in themselves but have been combined to make an experience which rather eclipses the mute paintings and small sculptures earlier on.
On the floor of this gallery is Allan Kaprow’s YARD, a random arrangement of used car tyres. Very unusually for any art gallery or installation, visitors are encouraged to climb all over it and so I did and it was lots of fun, albeit with a fair risk of twisting your ankle or falling over, given the bendy shifting nature of the tyres. Meanwhile at the same time, suspended from the ceiling is a car, a real, life-size, actual car. It’s a vintage Lotus, suspended upside-down by chains attached to the ceiling and moving; it slowly rotates while pulsing music emanates from a sound system strapped to its chassis. This stunning piece is by Conrad Shawcross and titled ‘Golden Lotus (Inverted)’.
Installation view of YARD by Allan Kaprow and ‘Golden Lotus (Inverted)’ by Conrad Shawcross in The Long View at the Saatchi Gallery (photo by Matt Chung)
As I’ve mentioned before, I grew up in a gas station and so am very partial to industrial subjects, sculptures and installations. The smell of petrol, oil and tyres take me back to my childhood. There was a tyre bay attached to the garage and behind our house was a big old shed, with rotting wooden walls and a rusty corrugated iron roof and in it were piled row upon row of tyres, stacked to form columns. When we played hide and seek as kids, it was a nifty trick to wriggle down the hollow tube formed by the empty centres of a dozen or so tyres stacked in a column, although if you half wriggled, half fell down the tube with your arms by your side, sometimes you got stuck, and sometimes a bit panicky, unless you wobbled the entire column so much it fell over and you were able to free yourself from the resulting mess of tyres, which generally spilled filthy rubbery water all over your clothes. All of which explains why I loved this installation to bits.
The next gallery is a return to the normal, formal, restrained air of a gallery. It has been partitioned off to display two video installations.
Chino Moya
Chino Moya is a London-based, Madrid-raised writer, film director, photographer and artist known for his multidisciplinary approach to exploring themes of collapsing utopias.
One of his ongoing projects is titled ‘Deemona’. It creates a fictional dystopian world expressed across various media, including video installations, photography and digital art. In this future world society is entirely governed by the scientific method and algorithms which act as new gods. This society is divided into four classes members of which are portrayed in the works on show here. They aren’t paintings but video animations and all done in a very distinctive style, a kind of sci fi new-classicism, very restrained and controlled, in a palette of green-blue, burgundy, and grey, designed to evoke non-places like office environments.
Some of the video installations from Deemona by Chino Moya in The Long View at the Saatchi Gallery (photo by Matt Chung)
What you have is eight video installations depicting isolated figures dressed in futuristic costumes who are slowly performing subtle, stylised movements. Each figure is situated in a static landscape filled with geometric architecture, arches, domes, a ‘starved classicism’ most associated with totalitarian regimes or utopian futures. The videos are cool, understated and strangely compelling and note the decoration surrounding them –the black dado railing along the gallery wall and the mysterious geometric objects scattered around the floor all add to the creation of a distinct futureworld. Here’s an interview with Moya explaining it all.
Mat Collishaw
We are polluting the oceans as never before, filling them with heavy metals, microplastics and industrial waste which are devastating marine life. In a darkened room is playing Mat Collishaw’s entrancing film, ‘Aftermath’, which brings together haunting imagines based on these themes. He imagines a future where human cities have been flooded by rising sea levels and in which new, mutated forms of ocean life swim between banks of abandoned, flooded computer servers, the kind which supported (current) the boom in artificial intelligence. The film’s soundtrack is the haunting ‘Cantus in memory of Benjamin Britten’ by Estonian composer Arvo Pärt, which you can hear not only in the darkened space where the film is projected, but in the rooms approaching and after it, casting a ghostly soundscape onto other, silent, works.
Bardo
Thus the Cantus follows you as you walk into the next room which is devoted to just one installation, ‘Bardo’ by ex-Young British Artist Gavin Turk (born 1967). It is, basically, a maze of mirrors, a bit confusing and disorientating as you make your way through its reflective corridors, surprisingly intricate given its relatively small size. I’ve walked through a number of mazes comparable to this but the idea here is that all the panels are not immaculate and shiny but – continuing the theme of environmental degradation – fragmented and dirty, spattered with what looks like peeling plaster or the deteriorated silvering you get behind old mirrors, crumbling and falling off, to convey ideas of decay and collapse.
Bardo by Gavin Turk in The Long View at the Saatchi Gallery (photo by Matt Chung)
20:50
For some time you’ve been able to smell the industrial aroma of heavy motor oil. All is revealed when you walk through the arch into the final space, which is housing Richard Wilson’s seminal installation, 20:50. This was a defining piece of British contemporary art when it was originally presented at the original Saatchi Galleries in north London in 1987. It can be installed in different spaces and involves sealing the floor, walls and doors of the room, building a sort of tray which completely fills the room apart from a walkway like a sort of trench out into it, then pouring thick black engine oil into the tray. The result is you walk along the trench to half way into the room and find yourself surrounded by the absolutely dead calm surface of the black oil in which all the features of the room (including yourself if you lean over it) are reflected.
20:50 by Richard Wilson in The Long View at the Saatchi Gallery (photo by the author)
As mentioned, I grew up in a gas station and filled countless thousands of cars up with petrol before checking their oil with a dipstick and a rag and offering customers top-ups of Castrol GTX or other oil, so the sight and smell of so much oil has a complex impact on me.
But for most people who haven’t had that experience this is still an amazingly potent work. Onto its placid black surface can be projected all a visitor’s anxieties about the dominance of our world by oil: the skewing of global politics and economies by oil; the existence of entire (repressive) regimes based on oil production; its countless toxic by-products destroying, for example, the river deltas of Nigeria; its central role in generating global warming. It was a potent symbol when it was first unveiled in 1987; now it has acquired mountains of additional symbolism and meaning.
And yet, at the same time, its immaculate stillness, the perfection of its reflection of the walls, windows and ceiling, create a strange, eerie, poisoned meditation. Strange, upsetting, beautiful but ominous, all at the same time.
Comments
The room full of engine oil is the climax of the show and there is, appropriately enough, no way out of it. Many galleries are arranged so you exit the last room into the shop, and are dumped from the World of Art into the world of tote bags and fridge magnets. Here, there is no way out of the world of oil except to turn back and retrace your steps, passing all the installations I’ve listed and back towards the paintings and smaller sculptures, dialling down the art and your psychological state, calming down from these big immersive installations, back to the world of modest-scale sculptures and flat paintings, before finally stumbling out of the gallery into the busy streets of Chelsea, dazed and stunned by everything you’ve seen.
Artists
The ones I liked and/or mentioned in my review, are highlighted in bold.
- Alice Anderson
- Olivia Bax
- Frankie Boyle
- Edward Burtynsky
- Peter Buggenhout
- André Butzer
- Jake Chapman
- Mat Collishaw
- Dan Colen
- John Currin
- Jo Dennis
- Zhivago Duncan
- Olafur Eliasson
- Rafael Gómezbarros
- Ximena Garrido-Lecca
- Damien Hirst
- Tom Hunter
- Henry Hudson
- Alex Katz
- Allan Kaprow
- Maria Kreyn
- Ansel Krut
- Rannva Kunoy
- Christopher Le Brun
- Chris Levine
- Ibrahim Mahama
- Carolina Mazzolari
- Jeff McMillan
- Misha Milovanovich
- Polly Morgan
- Ryan Mosley
- Chino Moya
- Tim Noble
- Alejandro Ospina
- Steven Parrino
- Martine Poppe
- Michael Raedecker
- Sterling Ruby
- Jenny Saville
- Petroc Sesti
- Conrad Shawcross
- Soheila Sokhanvari
- John Squire
- Dima Srouji
- Gavin Turk
- Richard Wilson
- Alexi Williams Wynn
Related links
- The Long Now continues at the Saatchi Gallery until 1 March 2026
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