Contents

- Introduction

- Overview: Painters’ Painters

- Painting and the photograph

- The artists

- Common themes

- Artist websites

Introduction...

The Saatchi Gallery is a contemporary art gallery –all of the

artworks on display are made by artists living and working

today

These artworks are at the cutting edge of contemporary art

Many of these artists have never exhibited in the UK

The Gallery hosts 3-4 new exhibitions per year

Many artists showing at the Saatchi Gallery are unknown

when first exhibited, not only to the general public but also to

the commercial art world

Many of these artists are subsequently offered shows by

galleries and museums internationally. In this effect, the

gallery operates as a springboard for young artists to launch

their careers

Overview: Painters’ Painters

9 present-day painters diverse in age, nationality and approach

In an age where painting has become one strand among many in contemporary art making, Painters’ Painters

brings together a small group of distinctive figures in the field

These artists have been undeterred by the gradual decline in interest in the art form. The place of painting in

the art world today could be seen as both mainstream and niche

There is no discernible style or movement these artists belong to and the exhibition aims to examine the very

individualistic and nonconformist approaches explored by these painters

The artists are proving to be inspirational to a younger generation of artists emerging from the world’s leading

art schools

Are painters less worried about living rivals? Are they more concerned with the enormous weight of all the

great painters that came before them?

Painting and the photograph Paul Delaroche, a French painter, famously announced in 1839 that “From today, painting is dead”. This was in

response to seeing examples of the Daguerreotype- the first successful photographic process. Of course,

painting did not die in 1839. Painters such as Monet, Cezanne, Matisse, Picasso, Pollock, Rothko, Bacon and

Freud, to name but a few, are proof of that.

It would be closer to the truth to say that the invention of photography revived painting rather than killed it,

all of a sudden painters had a new challenge- to create new visual languages that challenged the photograph,

and freed painting from the task of representation, primarily of portraiture.

It is also incorrect to think of painting and photography as always being at odds with one another. The two

disciplines have a long and close association, and many of the artists in Painters’ Painters work with

photography and the printed image.

“The world does not look like a photograph.

The lens sees geometrically and we see

psychologically”

- David Hockney

Today, painting is both mainstream & niche:

- Mainstream in that it is one of the earliest & most important

art forms, practised by mankind from the very beginning

- Niche in that it could be seen to have fallen from favour in

the art world- are other art forms perceived as responding

to contemporary society in a more relevant way?

The Artists

Richard Aldrich

Raffi Kalenderian

Martin Maloney Ryan Mosely

David Brian Smith

Dexter Dalwood

Ansel Krut

Bjarne Melgaard

David Salle

• Born in 1981, Los Angeles

• Lives and works in LA

• Work primarily in portraiture

• Uses watercolours, graphite and

coloured pencils, sometimes

combined in collage with found

photocopied materials

• Paints close friends and family in

intimate settings

• Prefers to work from life

• Use of bold lines and solid areas

of colour allude to a graphic way

of painting

• His work is a reminder that

painting is inseparable from

drawing

• The intense pattern and lack of

perspective create an almost

claustrophobic scene

• Figures blend into their

backgrounds, becoming as

inanimate as the objects around

them

• He uses this restrained medium

to comment on the self-centred

confinement of today’s society

• Although the paintings are of

people he knows well, the

figures are often depicted in stiff,

awkward positions

Raffi Kalenderian [gallery 1]

Above: Rachel, 2007, oil on canvas, 213.4 x

121.9cm

Top right: Dasha (Chelsea Hotel), 2013, oil on

canvas, 213 x 264cm

Bottom right: Spirit Guides and Sunflowers,

2008, oil on canvas, 152.4 x 248.9cm

Artwork in focus: Highlanders 2008

Oil on canvas (triptych)

213.4 x 137.2 cm each panel

• Highlanders is a triptych of three panel paintings, each portraying a person sitting in

a plastic lawn chair on a porch overlooking a vast and oddly green LA landscape

• Ominous black clouds hang in the huge sky above them in fat swirls

• In Kalenderian’s world, even the sky becomes as tangible as a chair

• Most of Kalenderian’s protagonists are depicted in full-length portraits in domestic

settings, the works’ titles giving us their first names only

• Kalenderian’s backgrounds present an almost claustrophobic closure

• This is due primarily to a simple visual trick that reinforces a ‘faulty’ perspective: at

times, elements our perception would register as being further away are shown at

the same scale as motifs in the foreground

• As a result, background spaces are reduced to a two-dimensional "curtain" and the

figures appear as though placed in front of drapery or stock backdrop in a

photography studio

Associated artist: Edward

Hopper

Kalenderian’s work has been compared to

that of American painter Edward Hopper’s, in

his depiction of the ‘solitary American’ in

interior spaces.

L-R, Western Motel, 1957, oil on canvas

Room in New York, 1932, oil on canvas

Richard Aldrich [gallery 2]

• Born in 1975, USA

• Lives and works in New York

• He started out as a poet &

writer, also experimented

with electronic music

• His work does not seem to

move in a particular

direction- it navigates its way

through different styles and

back again

• The paintings he made

around 2003 were small by

necessity (Future Portrait

#49)- he made them in his

basement studio in which he

could barely stand up. He

had to paint them on a table

or on his lap

• Often works on gessoed

panels with a mixture of oil

paint, mineral spirits and

wax, which he lays on with a

brush or palette knife

• He often adds objects that

he finds lying around his

studio, for example bits of

wood

Future Portrait #49, 2003, acrylic on panel, 30.5 x

30.5cm

Past, Present and Future (#1), 2009, oil, wax, matte medium,

charcoal, cut linen, plant

213.4 x 147.3cm

Aldrich describes his practice as “working out the

relationships between objects in time and space,

be it a blank canvas, an empty room or spans of

time”.

Dexter Dalwood [gallery 3]• Born in 1960, Bristol, UK

• Lives and works in London

• He left school at 16 to pursue a

career in music

• He discovered painting in the late

70s and he says “a light came on”

• Being alone in a room making a

mess is what first attracted him to

painting

• He studied at Central St Martins

and the Royal College of Art

• He was shortlisted for the Turner

Prize in 2010

• He works first in collage to depict

the scenes, borrowing images

from other paintings, magazines,

photographs, newspapers, the

internet. He then reassembles

them as flat, bright acrylic

paintings

• His paintings depict imagined

places, often interiors, belonging

to a real person- always famous

and usually dead

• They often depict the scene of a

famous incident or event

• The figures are always absent- as

if they are “off-set”. The viewer is

required to fill in the blanks

“I am obsessive about looking at and making

paintings. The viewer must use their imagination

to complete my images, so I create images that

trigger memories, or play upon images they may

have already have in mind about certain

events.”

Kurt Cobain’s Greenhouse, 2000, oil on canvas, 214 x 258cm

Brian Jones’ Swimming Pool, 2000, oil on canvas, 275

x 219cm

Artwork in focus: Grosvenor Square 2002

Oil on canvas

268 x 347 cm

• Depicts an open space outside the American Embassy

in London in 1969

• This was during the time of demonstrations against the

Vietnam War

• The diversity of his source material is such that for this

piece he layered together a photographic source, a motif

from a contemporary painter and an imagined landscape

of his own

• He began with a small Polaroid photograph of the statue

of Franklin D.Roosevelt

• He added trees from Georg Baselitz’s paintings, in their

trademark upside-down form (right)

• Then he added an “invented autumn wistful lawn with

fallen leaves”

He recreates landscapes and

interiors that the viewer may

feel they are already familiar

with from collective knowledge

formed from media history. He

combines this with art

historical references.

Georg Baselitz, The Forest Upside Down,

1969, oil on canvasHe is concerned that painting as a medium has the potential to give everything away too quickly, especially

when compared with other contemporary disciplines such as performance, film or video- which require a

commitment of time- or even sculpture, for which a viewer must move through the physical space in order to

completely ‘take in’ the work. Painting, in contrast, is fully contained within its edges, and even the largest of

canvases can be consumed with a cursory glance.

To combat this, his paintings aim to slow down the viewer. He creates carefully balanced compositions, his

paintings offering no immediate resting point for the eye. Recognisable objects or familiar motifs hint at

connections between diverse parts and the works become a puzzle to be solved- a reward for the viewer who is

willing to take the time to pause, look and think.

Martin Maloney [gallery 4]• Born 1961, London

• Lives and works in London

• Cheery, apparently naïve,

depiction of people

• This group of paintings were

made in 2004

• Maloney’s studio assistant

posed for all of the figures-

“she was like a prop to make

the paintings around”

• He would then add an

invented background- a

mixture of observation and

invention

• The mundane becomes a

cause for fascination in his

paintings

• The clueless characters

seem to surround themselves

with props: a TV set, a cat, a Walkman

• The objects’ utility however is

discarded in favour of their

decorative appeal- everything

remains on the surface

• It appears to be a fantasy

projection of a child trying to

imagine his or her grown up

life

“We’ve lived through 150 years of people draining colour from our lives.

People think that colour is light-hearted, not serious. But what’s the

opposite? Gloom, doom- why would anyone want that?”

Stroller, 2004, oil on canvas, 260 x 231cm Saplings, 2004, oil on canvas, 244 x 213cm

Sources of inspiration… “David Hockney, Alex Katz, Willem

De Kooning, Picasso, Bonnard, you think about different

things on different days. When you make something, you may

suddenly find a connection that you didn’t think was there”

Willem de Kooning, Woman V, 1952–53,

oil, enamel, and charcoal on canvas

Top right: Alex Katz,

Katherine & Elizabeth,

2012, oil on linen

Left: David Hockney,

The Conversation,

1980, oil on canvas

Right: Pierre Bonnard,

The Toilet, 1932, oil

on canvas

David Salle [gallery 5]

Salle’s work is a reshuffle of existing things. The

title of his painting Picture Builder alludes to

this, while Angels in the Rain collates funerary

statues, performing bears on bicycles, swirling

lines- plus a fish, a candlestick, fruit and a giant

shell, which might come from a 17th century

Dutch still life.

• Born in 1952, Oklahoma,

USA

• Lives and works in New

York

• Bases his paintings on

motifs from art history,

advertisements, design,

everyday culture and his

own photography

• His work is a matter of

putting together “different

elements taken from here

and there”

• His paintings have

included allusions to

Velaquez, Bernini,

Cezanne, Giacometti and

Magritte

• There is a sense of

transparency in his

paintings- they appear to

have openings, space you

can pass through

• He also works in

performance and has

worked with famous

choreographers to create

sets and costumes for

ballets and operas

• He is a prolific writer on art

Angels In The Rain, 1998, acrylic and oil on canvas and linen, 244 x 335 cm

Picture Builder, 1993, acrylic and oil on canvas, 213 x 290 cm

“Artists are basically looking for things they

can use. Is there anything to admire? Or,

is there anything I have to worry about?

The images I use in my work are specific;

they’re not random. They’re not from all

over the place; they’re from certain places”

Ansel Krut [gallery 6]

• Born in 1959, Cape Town, South

Africa

• Lives and works in London

• Initially he painted in a classical

style before becoming interested in

a more anarchic subject matter

• Krut’s technique is to construct the

surfaces of his canvases with

layers of colourful oil paint

• Krut uses the juxtaposition of

seemingly random subject matter to

build a sense of contradiction in his

work

• Practices ‘picture painting’, taking

inspiration from both classical

portraiture and cartooning as a way

of reconciling these conflicting

traditions

• Views cartoons as just as important

as any other art historical genre

• Although often regarded as tongue-

in-cheek and playful, his work also

addresses serious political issues,

such as the Apartheid in South

Africa

• Krut first works out the images as

sketches, then introduces colour

before finally translating the image

into a painting

“Everything is turned on its head. And in a

way I want to make images that don’t allow

you to settle on any certainties. Often you

start looking at a picture and then you find

the carpet has been pulled from under your

feet”

“All of my paintings are about

some kind of confrontation or

engagement with the viewer. The

character is looking out at you, not

challenging exactly, but it’s asking

you to deal with its strangeness”

Head with Bottles, 2008, oil on canvas, 76 x 61cm

Little Fry-Up, 2006, oil on canvas, 41 x 30cm

Artwork in focus: Napoleon On Elba2008

Oil on canvas

100 x 100 cm

• Inspired by Ingres’s stately portrait Napoleon on his Imperial

Throne (1806)

• The original made him think of toilet paper- perhaps it was

the voluminous ermine and white of the Emperor’s robes

• He recycled this image of glorified political dominance as a

lavatorial still life. He bought some cheap toilet paper, which

posed in his studio, in place of the mighty ruler in his glory

• By rendering Naopleon as stacked loo rolls, Krut is reflecting

on the absurdity of official portraits

• The muted tones relate to the density or materiality of the

paint itself, which looks slightly digested as if it has run

through some sort of system

Associated artists

• Cubists and Futurists

• Turn-of-the-century still life paintings depicting collections of

vegetables and orifices

• Krut is a leading practitioner of what might be termed

"cartoon noir," a genre that includes New York-based artist

Joyce Pensato and Armenian-born, London-based Armen

Eloyan

• Philip Guston (also Cartoon Noir)

Bjarne Melgaard [gallery 7]

• Born 1967, Sydney,

Australia to Norwegian

parents

• Raised in Norway

• Lives and works in New

York

• He has been described as

the most internationally

prominent Norwegian

artist since Edvard Munch

• His works and exhibitions

have sparked controversy

due to references to

subversive subcultures

• This resulted in the

closure of one of his

exhibitions

• He is also interested in

activist art

• His artwork relates to his

extensive writings,

including the many novels

he has written

• Melgaard also works in

sculpture, performance

and installation

Above: Untitled, Fear of Les Super, 2007, oil on canvas, 200 x 300cm

Left (top): Untitled, 2007, oil on canvas, 180 x 180cm

Left (bottom): Untitled, 2007, oil on canvas, 180 x 180cm

“You need to reinvent yourself all the time- that’s

where you get your energy from…it’s important for

me to move between different areas of

professionalism, from very low-key galleries to an

upper-class Manhattan gallery…I don’t want to

communicate to the same audiences all the time”

Melgaard, Munch and Basquiat

Edvard Munch was a prolific yet perpetually troubled artist

preoccupied with matters of human mortality such as chronic illness,

sexual liberation and religious aspiration. He expressed these

obsessions through works of intense colour, semi-abstraction and

mysterious subject matter. Bjarne Melgaard has been likened to

Munch as both artists are concerned with themes of sexuality, gender,

death, loneliness and alienation. They both deal with these central

experiences encountered by the human being in modern society, yet

set against the backdrop of their own times.

Edvard MunchThe Scream, 1893, oil, tempera and

pastel on cardboard

“I was walking down the road

with two friends when the sun

set; suddenly, the sky turned as

red as blood. I stopped and

leaned against the fence...

shivering with fear. Then I

heard the enormous, infinite

scream of nature”.

Jean-Michel BasquiatDustheads, 1982

acrylic, oil stick, spray enamel and metallic paint on canvas

Formally, Melgaard has close links to the American artist Jean

Michel Basquiat, whose visually-shrieking colours and bold paint marks make the eyes dance and dart across the canvas. Both

artists use black contours, filled-in and coloured fields and built-up

areas of paint versus thin and exacting lines. Their works feature

cartoon-like characters and hold a false sense of naivety.

Ryan Mosley [gallery 8] • Born in 1980, Chesterfield,

UK

• Lives and works in London

UK

• Having previously worked as

a security guard at the

National Gallery, the

traditional paintings left a

lasting impression on him. He

could often be found

sketching them in secret

whilst at work

• Mosely’s paintings are often

developments originating

from small illustrations jotted

down in his notebook

• His father was an engineer

and Mosley attributes his

enthusiasm for painting to his

father’s technical drawings

• His paintings relate to notions

of carnival and the grotesque

• He invents and choreographs

strange characters

• He notes the importance of

mistakes in his work, instead

of erasing them he uses them

to organically develop the

piece and take on new,

unexpected forms

“I only ever paint for myself. As selfish

as it sounds, they are paintings I want to

make and want to look at. When the

audience engage with the paintings I

find it fascinating that an individual will

bring to it their own readings and

interpretations”

Piano Tuners, 2011, oil on canvas, 220 x 190cm

Emperor Butterfly, 2007, oil on linen, 160 x 180cm

Artwork in focus: Empress Butterfly2007

Oil on linen

200 x 180cm

• Empress Butterfly was conceived as a partner painting to

Emperor Butterfly (as seen on previous slide)

• Layering of drawings with a paint brush and painterly

gestures presents a figure with multiple limbs

• All the weight is on one knuckle as if the foetal figure is a

chrysalis in transformation

• The characters in both paintings evolved from the

paintings in Mosley’s degree show which was about the

celebratory nature of a carnival

• “It’s like a pseudo religious character or a mythic

anthropomorphic figure” Mosley describes

• There is no preconceived notion of what any painting will

become. Each one is an act of discovery

“I’m drawn to other painters

that tend to deal with the

figure or anatomy, as that is

something we all have in

common as human beings”

Above right:

Dana Shutz, Reformers, 2004, oil on canvas,

190.5 x 231 cm

Bottom, L-R:

R B Kitaj, The Autumn of Central Paris (after

Walter Benjamin) 1972-3, Oil on canvas 60 x 60

in

Philip Guston, The Studio, 1969, oil on canvas,

121.9 x 106.7 cm

James Ensor, Strange Masks, 1892, oil on

canvas

David Brian Smith [gallery 10]• Born in 1981,

Wolverhampton, UK

• Lives and works in London

• He was raised on a farm in

Shropshire

• The landscapes in his

paintings are inspired by the

British countryside

• His paintings derive from

family photographs taken by

his great-grandfather, a

clergyman living in India

• His use of photography is

more poetic than it is literal- it

is a way of entering a lost

world

• Each painting takes one

month to complete

• He begins each painting with

a simple composition and

very little is planned in

advance

• It has been said that there is

an ‘unfamiliar’ feel to his

paintings, which he likes

“When I begin a new body of work, I limit my colour pallet. Recently eight paintings have

gone on show at the Albert Baronian Gallery in Brussels. I began the process of making this

work with the colours yellow, orange and blue in mind. This helps me when I get stuck and

creates a coherency throughout the body of paintings and ultimately the exhibition”

Great Expectations- Wow, 2010, oil on

herringbone linen, 180 x 150cm

Great Expectations- A Windy Day, 2015, oil on linen, 220 x 270cm

“Van Gogh and David Salle were early influences. When I’m

working on a new body of work I don’t like to see painting shows”

Vincent Van Gogh, Road with Cypress and Star,

1890, oil on canvas

Vincent Van Gogh, Landscape with Olive Trees,

1889, oil on canvas

David Brian Smith, My Soul Hath a Remembrance and Is

Humbled In Me II, 2011, oil on herringbone linen, 180 x 150cm

“In the collection of paintings at the Saatchi Gallery, three of the figures are of a shepherd that I’ve never met. My mother sent me an image of

that shepherd amongst a flock of sheep. She found the image in a newspaper, hidden under a carpet in her home that she moved to after selling

the farm in 2006, with some pressed flowers in it! The image was in a Sunday express from 1933 and was there to commemorate the armistice.

She sent it to me because it’s a lovely photo but more significantly, because my father died in late 2005 and he was a shepherd, it seemed to sum

up where we were at that time. This series is always entitled Great Expectations.

In My Soul Hath a Remembrance and is Humbled In Me II, I became the shepherd”.

Common themes• Popular culture, mass media and the Internet (Dexter Dalwood, David Salle)

• Appropriation of images (David Brian Smith, Dexter Dalwood, Ansel Krut, David Salle, David Brian Smith)

• Use of historical sources/traditions (David Brian Smith, Dexter Dalwood, Ansel Krut, Ryan Mosley, David Salle)

• Abstraction and space (Richard Aldrich, Ansel Krut, Ryan Mosley)

• Rural life and nature (David Brian Smith, Dexter Dalwood)

• City life (Dexter Dalwood, Martin Maloney)

• A national identity (Dexter Dalwood, David Brian Smith, Martin Maloney)

• The everyday/ mundane (Dexter Dalwood, Raffi Kalenderian, Martin Maloney)

• Celebrity culture (Dexter Dalwood)

• Sub cultures (Bjarne Melgaard, Ryan Mosley)

• Portraiture (David Brian Smith, Raffi Kalenderian, Ansel Krut, Martin Maloney)

• “Bad” art/ naïve art (Martin Maloney, Bjarne Melgaard)

• Absence (Richard Aldrich, David Brian Smith, Dexter Dalwood)

• Death and mortality (David Brian Smith, Bjarne Melgaard)

• Familiarity / Unfamiliarity (David Brian Smith, Dexter Dalwood, Martin Maloney)

• Social/ political unrest (Bjarne Melgaard)

• Found objects and the ready-made (Richard Aldrich)

• The absurd (Ansel Krut, Ryan Mosley)

Artist websites

Richard Aldrich

bortolamigallery.com

David Brian Smith

davidbriansmith.com

Dexter Dalwood

dexterdalwood.com

Raffi Kalendrian

peterkilchmann.com

Ansel Krut

modernart.net

Martin Maloney

saatchigallery.com

Bjarne Melgaard

bjarnemelgaard.com

Ryan Mosley

alisonjacquesgallery.com

David Salle

davidsallestudio.net