YGAs* set to take BritArt by storm

* Young German Artists

By Robin Stummer
Sunday, 29 February 2004

It may be the beginning of the end for BritArt. Vastly expensive, habitually hyped and predictably shocking, the work of the YBAs (Young British Artists) is having to make way for the new passion among wealthy collectors and international art-market speculators: the Young German Artists.

It may be the beginning of the end for BritArt. Vastly expensive, habitually hyped and predictably shocking, the work of the YBAs (Young British Artists) is having to make way for the new passion among wealthy collectors and international art-market speculators: the Young German Artists.

The buying habits of the multi-millionaire collector Charles Saatchi can shape art markets. Mr Saatchi is credited with "making" celebrated BritArtists, such as Damien Hirst, the Chapman brothers and Tracey Emin, but over the past 18 months he has been discreetly buying up work by young continental artists in their 20s and 30s, including several Germans.

Now, The Independent on Sunday has learnt, another major international art buyer, the Korean property magnate-turned-artist CI Kim, has focused his attentions on Germany. Mr Kim, who, like Mr Saatchi, has been an avid collector of British contemporary art, has just completed his own hurried shopping spree in Leipzig and Berlin. The IoS understands that he has bought around 20 works by various YGAs. Mr Kim's office would not reveal the amount he spent in Germany, but on a similar spree in London last August, he is believed to have paid several million pounds for works including Charity, Damien Hirst's massive bronze statue of a disabled-girl collection box.

Mr Kim's office told the IoS yesterday: "He is interested in this art because they have such a distinctive character and style." And, of course, if you've a few hundred thousand pounds to spare, new German art could also prove to be a very good investment.

Though yet to command the vast sums paid for some of the BritArt oeuvre, many YGA works are believed to be selling for between £20,000 and £100,000 - the kind of amounts achieved in the early days of the BritArt boom.

Mr Kim has already amassed the largest collection of contemporary British art outside the UK, housed in a specially built gallery complex in the city of Cheonan, Korea. He now intends to create one of the world's great repositories of recent German art.

Such is the current feeding frenzy among buyers for the work of German painters and sculptors that experts say Leipzig, the powerhouse of the country's burgeoning art industry, has sold out of new art. There is now a waiting list of up to three years to acquire new work.

Since the 1960s, a series of German artists have attracted international attention, notably Josef Beuys, Anselm Kiefer and Sigmar Polke. The city of Cologne provided much of the energy behind the modern art resurgence of the 1980s. More recently, the conceptual photographer Thomas Ruff and the Leipzig painter Neo Rauch have received critical acclaim.

Mr Kim is believed to have bought at least one work by Tobias Lehner, a 24-year-old Leipzig painter, while Mr Saatchi is believed to have bought several works by the Berlin-based painter Jonathan Meese. One of these, the huge, three-panel Temptation of the State of the Blessed Ones in Archland, was unveiled in January at the Saatchi Gallery in London.

Temptation is among many European works bought by Mr Saatchi over the past 18 months, and will feature in the New Blood exhibition, which opens next month at the Saatchi Gallery. It marks a clean break with Mr Saatchi's almost exclusively BritArt tastes of the past 10 years.

Including work by several Germans, as well as artists from Belgium, Japan, New Zealand, Israel and the United States, the exhibition will contain only a smattering of young British artists, among them the 26-year-old conceptualist Conrad Shawcross, son of the writer and journalist William Shawcross.

"New German art is being very strongly collected by collectors and banks from within the country," says Jari Lager of the Union Projects gallery in London. "But there are also a few major private collectors in Britain who are now making their first purchases and contacts and visits to Germany.

"The Leipzig artists have sold out of their work - you can't buy anything," she adds. "Everything has been bought. There are around a dozen artists there who are doing very, very well."

According to Anna Somers Cocks, founding editor of The Art Newspaper, the rise of the YGAs began across the Atlantic. "The reason the Germans have become strong is because the Americans adopted German contemporary art with a vengeance about five years ago," she says.

"The Germans have a school of photographers who produce enormous architectural images. The Americans like photography anyway, but these Germans are by far the best photographic artists around."

How Saatchi discovered the art of a stripper

From The Times

February 24, 2004

By Dalya Alberge, Arts Correspondent A STRIPPER with no training as a painter has found herself in the art market’s spotlight after Charles Saatchi bought her first painting.

Stella Vine, 35, was astonished to learn that Britain’s foremost collector of contemporary art had bought her portrait of a bleeding Diana, Princess of Wales, for £600 — the pay for four nights’ work in a strip club.

When Mr Saatchi buys and sells, the art world takes note. His activities are regarded as a barometer of the market. Damien Hirst, the animal pickler, and Tracey Emin, best-known for her unmade bed, are among the artists whose reputations have been made by Mr Saatchi’s interest in them.

“I really love your painting,” he had told Ms Vine, after noticing it at the Transition Gallery in North London. Ms Vine, a friend of the gallery’s owner who had been included in a show of emerging artists, said that Mr Saatchi had said: “ ‘How much is that? I’ll have it’. I couldn’t believe it.”

The artist, who is a single mother, had until recently performed at the Windmill Club in Soho. Now she has moved to a smaller venue in London.

Her painting Hi Paul Can You Come Over, which shows the Princess begging for help from her butler Paul Burrell, will be featured in an exhibition from Mr Saatchi that is to open next month, New Blood. Ms Vine painted the work after reading that the Princess had believed that there were plans to kill her.

Ms Vine said her dream is to become a full-time artist. It was the “dark side” of stripping that she wanted to get away from, she said. “You meet some wonderful women — people in the law, nursing and single parents trying to get by,” she said. “But you also meet a lot of dark men and it is easy to get sucked into dodgy stuff. You’ve got to be really tough inside to maintain who you are.”

Ms Vine left home at 13 and became pregnant at 16 by the caretaker at the bedsits where she was living. She eventually left him and went to a drama school in Wandsworth.

She worked as a waitress but was not making enough to live on, and found work in hostess bars and strip clubs, dancing nude. She said: “At one point, I was totally broke. I began table-dancing in Wembley, earning £20 a night. I was struggling.”

A year after opening its doors at County Hall, the Saatchi Gallery will feature previously unseen work by a new generation of artists in its new show. The exhibition features a vibrating mummy by a New Zealand artist, Francis Upritchard; a travelling theatre caravan constructed from old tables and cupboards by an English artist, Brian Griffiths; and taxidermal horses’ bodies posed like Henry Moore sculptures by a Belgian artist, Berlinde de Bruyckere.

Since its opening, the Saatchi Gallery has attracted more than half a million visitors. The forthcoming exhibition will fill most of the 40,000 sq ft gallery, although works by the Chapman Brothers, Emin and Hirst will also be on view.