A fire that began on Monday and ripped through a warehouse in east London has destroyed millions of dollars worth of work by leading contemporary British artists, dozens of them from the vast collection of Charles Saatchi, the warehouse's owner and Mr. Saatchi said on Wednesday.
Among the works that have been lost are pieces by Damien Hirst, Sarah Lucas, Chris Ofili, Tracey Emin, Rachel Whiteread and Jake and Dinos Chapman, all part of the influential and showy Young British Artist movement championed and sustained by Mr. Saatchi for the last 15 or so years.
Well-known works destroyed in the fire, which raged for two days and leveled the warehouse, included Ms. Emin's ''Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995,'' a tent on which she had stitched the names of dozens of past lovers; and the Chapman brothers' ''Hell,'' a series of nine miniature landscapes depicting the horrors of war that took them two years to make and that, according to some reports, cost Mr. Saatchi £500,000, or about $905,000.
The fire broke out early Monday in an industrial park full of small businesses, spreading from another building into a warehouse belonging to Momart, a company that specializes in handling, storing and transporting art and antiquities. A spokesman for the Metropolitan Police said that the fire was being ''treated as suspicious'' -- which is routine in such cases -- but would not confirm reports that it had been caused by explosions in gas canisters stored in a building adjoining the art warehouse.
In a statement Momart, whose clients include Tate Modern, the Tate Britain, the National Gallery and Buckingham Palace, said that it had lost 5 to 10 percent of the artwork it stores. It declined to estimate the cost of the works that had been destroyed, but news reports speculated that the pieces were worth millions of pounds.
Momart is highly respected in London and, according to its Web site, www.momart.co.uk, has handled most ''major exhibitions in the U.K. over the past 20 years.''
In its statement issued late Wednesday Momart said the fire was so fierce that company officials had not been allowed onto the site, known in Britain as an industrial estate, and thus had been ''unable to ascertain the exact condition of the works that were stored there.'' The company said however that ''it would appear that all the buildings on the estate have been destroyed.''
Momart also said that confidentiality agreements meant it could not provide details of the works that had been destroyed or the clients who owned them. But it said, ''We can confirm that the facility contained works owned by a wide range of commercial galleries and individual collectors.''
Details of the works that were destroyed trickled out all day Wednesday, though. A spokeswoman for Mr. Hirst, Jude Tyrell, said that Mr. Hirst had lost a number of pieces from his personal collection, including 16 of his own paintings depicting butterflies and ''spinning'' designs, as well as works by Gary Hume, Sarah Lucas and Angus Fairhurst. ''Charity,'' a 22-foot-tall bronze statue by Mr. Hirst owned by another collector, which news reports said was worth more than £1 million (about $1.8 million), was also destroyed, Ms. Tyrell said.
Mr. Hirst, best known for work like his dead shark floating eerily in a tank of formaldehyde, is one of the most important figures in the Young British Artist movement. To the extent that the movement had a specific beginning, it was when he commandeered an abandoned warehouse in 1988 and organized ''Freeze,'' a show of his and his friends' taboo-breaking works in video, sculpture, painting, collage and photography that investigated themes like life, death and the angst of existence.
A number of pieces from ''Freeze'' were destroyed in the fire, said Will Paget, a spokesman for the Saatchi Gallery.
Mr. Paget said that Mr. Saatchi had lost about 100 pieces but that his collection was evenly spread out among six warehouses, only one of which had been destroyed. But Mr. Saatchi was said to be devastated at the loss of so much of the collection he had lovingly and cannily built up.
''Many of these works are great personal favorites of Charles Saatchi and works he considers to be completely irreplaceable for the history of British art,'' Mr. Paget said.
In a statement Ms. Emin said she was ''very saddened'' at the loss of works that ''had great personal and emotional value and are irreplaceable.'' She added, ''It is a great tragedy for British culture that so much art was destroyed in the fire.''
Several of the artists, including Ms. Emin, Mr. Hirst and the Chapmans, are represented by the White Cube, a gallery that, as much as Mr. Saatchi, is strongly identified with the Young British Artist movement.
Jay Jopling, the gallery's director, said he did not yet have a complete list of which works had been destroyed. ''A number of our artists have been affected by this terrible tragedy, and everyone is in a state of profound shock,'' he said.
As for the Chapman brothers, whose depictions of mutilated plastic dolls with extra limbs and genitals in strange places have attracted attention and opprobrium, they reacted to the fire by telling The Daily Telegraph that ''Hell,'' the piece that was destroyed, was ''only art'' and that they could make it again.
The work, depicting scenes of disaster and chaos, was made from 5,000 figures portraying skeletons, Nazis, soldiers and deformed humans that had been cast and hand-painted by the artists.
Although he later said that ''on a scale of 1 to 10 of how annoyed I am, I'd say about 11,'' Jake Chapman also joked to The Telegraph that the work ''can't be burned, because it's hotter in hell than it is in there.'' He added, ''I suspect, in fact, it will, in fact, have gone up in value if it has been burned to death.''
沒有留言:
張貼留言