Saatchi – What's Hot London? https://www.whatshotlondon.co.uk Find out! Thu, 13 Jul 2017 03:44:30 +0000 en-GB hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.7.1 https://www.whatshotlondon.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/cropped-mobile-app-logo-32x32.jpg Saatchi – What's Hot London? https://www.whatshotlondon.co.uk 32 32 The Saatchi #SelfExpression Competition https://www.whatshotlondon.co.uk/the-saatchi-selfexpression-competition/ Wed, 12 Jul 2017 14:17:43 +0000 https://www.whatshotlondon.co.uk/?p=5587 The Saatchi Gallery is enjoying a very smartphone-friendly summer, with the recent announcement that its popular From Selfie to Self Expression exhibition has been extended to July 23rd and also the launch of their #SelfieExpression competition. It’s open to anyone with a smartphone regardless of whether you’re an artist, photographer or just your average mobile phone snapper. The only stipulations are that you are over 16 and the photograph is not a selfie. Dating In Odessa Ukraine

The previous competition was just as popular as the exhibition, attracting 14,000 entries from 113 different countries, but the shift away from smartphone self-portraiture to wider areas of creative expression will still hold the smart device as central to this fascination with mobile technology.

There will be ten short-listed winners and they’ll have their photos exhibited at the Saatchi as well as receive a Huawei mobile phone. The overall winner will be announced at a special event on September 5th and will be rewarded with a solo exhibition at the gallery.

Entries are open until July 23rd (which is also the closing date for the From Selfie to Self Expression exhibition) and you can submit up to six photos but no video content is allowed.

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Exit from Aden: New Works by ALO (Exhibition) https://www.whatshotlondon.co.uk/exit-from-aden-new-works-by-alo/ Fri, 17 Mar 2017 14:22:13 +0000 https://www.whatshotlondon.co.uk/?p=4693 Three years after his Hail to the Loser debut show at the Saatchi, Italian artist ALO returns bearing the fruits of an urban expressionist style developed from street art and studio work. Now based in London since 2011, this journey also took him to Paris where, no doubt, the inspiration for A French Gypsy Lady (mixed media on wood) was found.

Like much of this figurative work it has a strong ethnic feel, perhaps those patterned robes are more African or Middle Eastern than gypsy. Other female figures have angular Afros marked out with his signature stiff lines and hard angles. Even their sometimes disembodied eyes have this geometric style. There’s a stylistic uniformity across canvases where he employs a pointillist effect to produce a rainfall-like pattern in the background. These vertical dashes are interrupted only by the horizontal lines in the grids and squares in disparate corners of the canvases.

The commonplace subject matter of ‘Drunk Lady’ and ‘Man & Cigarette’, to name a few, owes much to his self-confessed admiration of Italian master Caravaggio who stood out amongst his contemporaries for painting everyday people in sometimes unflattering ways rather than pandering to the idealistic beauty of the times. But where Caravaggio employed the dramatic use of lighting to add his emotive take on these representations, ALO prefers an urban expressionism which can be seen in the absence of soft curves and gentle edges as well as his use of jarring colours.

The nods to German Expressionism can be felt from afar and up close. Everything from the stick-thin necks to the exaggerated squared off shoulders, a subjective take on human existence coloured by the artist’s life experience and creative journey. There is an awkwardness, a disjointed sense of angst dressed up in the paradoxical urban cool of street life.

There’s so much of his work on show in the two rooms of the Saatchi’s Print & Originals Gallery that some paintings have even crept round to the serving area of the private view’s champagne reception; where they should have been better lit. But that aside, this young artist has set his stall as a name to be looked out for in 2017.

Exit from Aden: New Works by ALO Saatchi Gallery, Kings Rd, Chelsea 15 March to 10 April

 

 

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