Jealous London X Saatchi Gallery
Right here right now (19th Aug - 9th Sept 2021)
Recently, we made a beeline for The Kings Road in order to catch the final weekend of Right Here Right Now, the show put on by Jealous Print Studio in collaboration with the Saatchi gallery.
Showcasing a wide array of artists who will be very familiar to readers of this column. It was an unadulterated pleasure to walk into such an established bastion of contemporary art patronage and witness works by Charming Baker, Kate Gibb, Xenx, Sara Pope, Jessica Albarn and Danny Augustine, to mention just a small number of the artists collected together for this engaging show.
Right from the outset the first thing which becomes apparent is that, leafing through these works in hinged folios inside Jealous’ print studio on rainy Shoreditch Saturday morning vs seeing those same works framed, hung and given space to breathe in a brightly lit, cavernous space such as those afforded at the Saatchi, completely transforms the viewing experience. This may sound like an obvious, even glib statement to make but it underpins the essential relationship between ‘how’ we consume, and the corresponding value we attach to ‘what’ we consume. Any notion that such revered spaces and coveted rooms as these should be the exclusive preserve of the masters falls apart when you are faced with a vibrant 4 X 4 bank of floral studies by Jess Wilson or the majestically scuffed up deconstruction of Hockney by Danny Augustine, and it feels very much like exhibitions of this type should be the norm, rather than the exception in the turbulent curatorial landscape of London’s much fought over gallery space.
When you can walk into the rarified voids of Maddox and Bond Street and view pieces which are certainly no more arresting than those shown here, but which have price tags many multiples greater, you are left with a reinforced sense of how keenly the puppet masters are running the show. How does it make sense that you can buy a numbered print directly off the wall of the Saatchi for a few hundred pounds when artists working within the same field, using the same materials and following a similar aesthetic are being sold off the wall at the Maddox for tens of thousands of pounds?
Clearly the patronage of a Gagosian or Zwirner makes an almost unquantifiable difference to the money an artist’s work can command, we know of the dark arts whereby, in leaner, times a prolific backer such as the aforementioned will continue to hoover up any artist on their portfolio at inflated prices in the auction rooms of Christies and Bonhams so as to insure the continued perception of integrity the market affords the artist in question. This high stakes doubling down is the foundation on which confidence in the art world is built, and what makes art a viable investment commodity, it was refreshing therefore to see both integrity and fair pricing in abundance at this show. We had expected every piece included in the inventory for right here right now to soar by multiples in price purely because of the prestige the walls of the Saatchi would imbue, but were pleasantly surprised on this point. Of course there are always anomalous pockets in any show where personal taste colours the lens of judgement, £3.5k for F*cking Ace by David Shrigley anyone?
One particular relationship which came to mind when viewing this show was that between the artist and commerce. On paper the two entities seem diametrically opposed. We suppose that there is an unspoken rule among artists that any courtship of, or indulgence in the mainstream is tantamount to selling your soul for a quick buck. Money is never in the mind of the artist. Money is always in the mind of the artist, it just comes down to how transparently it is prioritised. This issue arose while regarding a pair of 7 colour screenprints by Kate Gibb, entitled ‘Hotel Motel’, the two variants of this print looked beautiful next to each other, redolent of the America of Bukowski, treated to an acid splash of colour which wouldn’t have looked out of place in a Warhol piece, I was reminded of the collaboration Gibb had done with Sunspel earlier in the year, to produce a line of limited print shirts referencing the Isle of Wight and Glastonbury festivals, and it occurred to me that here there were parallels with the work Takashi Murakami did in reimagining the Luis Vuitton brand as something vibrant and candy coloured, such that Murakami even created his own paintings based around his bold reinterpretation of the Brand monogram for his own personal archive. Here then the lines between art and commerce can be both blurred, and at the same time sanctified, elevating both the art as well as the brand with which it correlates. This is contrary to the idea that both should necessarily be demeaned by association with each other, and at time when, following 18 months of wilderness, we more than ever need to be able to let ourselves off the hook over the compulsion to engage in some wanton consumerism, I find some comfort in that notion.
