Art competition: At a gallery near you

Thursday, 29 March 2007

Charles Saatchi may yet live to regret his reticence. When he launched his interactive art gallery last May he promised that he would not buy anything from the 25,000 artists displaying their work on the site for a year. When he finally logs on next month, he may find that he has been beaten to discovering the next Tracey Emin or Damien Hirst. Two weeks ago, The Independent offered readers the chance to put together a dream virtual art collection of works from Your Gallery. Now the winners can start building their real collection with prize money totalling £5,000.

Saatchi set up Your Gallery in May as a kind of temporary exhibition space following the closure of the County Hall gallery in 2005. Since then, it has taken off in a massive way, averaging six million hits a day, attracting both artists and buyers who wish to avoid the hefty percentages of the galleries by exhibiting and purchasing online.

Entrants were asked to choose five different works by five different artists, which were then judged by Independent art critic Sue Hubbard, who was looking for "a visual and intellectual coherence, thoughtfulness and emotional integrity and an intuitive eye; work that said something meaningful, considered and authentic".

Although Saatchi praises the high standard of the entries ­ "It comes as no surprise that Independent readers have such sophisticated taste. Many of the entrants had made great choices for their collections, so the winners did really well to stand out" ­ not all of the entrants avoided the pitfalls of curating and collecting. "Some people simply chose the pieces they liked most but which said nothing much when put together, others smothered their entries in turgid 'art speak', one mum even owned up to promoting her son!" says Hubbard.

"The collections I finally chose work together as groups to become more than the sum of their parts."

The first prize of £3,000 is awarded to Abbas William Akbari who impressed with his collection of black-and-white line drawings and photographs based on the themes of "Earth, creation and fragility", which examine the relationship between simplicity and complexity. "This was the first collection I saw and its quiet strength, along with a bold decision to narrow the collection down to black-and-white line drawings and photographs stayed with me as I looked through the other groups," says Hubbard.

"I like the element of abstraction and the way one work relates to another, how light and shade speak of human fragility and complexity and of subtle emotions barely stated."

The runners-up, who each receive £500, include Pam Glew whose mixed-media collection evoking isolation and solitude, also addresses the wider themes of environmental damage ­ Emissions is a bleakly beautiful photograph of factories puffing their smoke into the night air ­ and youth culture. The collection is given a blackly humorous conclusion with the final image, a cookie-cutter in the shape of a gun, called Shaping Young America. Sami Jalili's collection, showing a clear unity of form and colour is pulled together by the central hyper-real portrait. "The depopulated spaces became movingly articulated by the inclusion of the single, shut-eyed portrait full of ambiguous emotion," says Hubbard.

Julian Macqueen's collection "showed a highly developed eye" in its unity of soft colours and elemental imagery. Macqueen, who spends his lunch breaks wandering around the galleries of Old Street in London, chose the works because they are all "lovely stuff and commercial too, with enough tension between the welcoming colours and abstract presentation to prevent them from being in any way twee". Hubbard agrees. "The sense of colour and lightness was irresistible and denoted a sure and sophisticated sense of what makes a good painting."

Tom Morgan's collection of portraits and one sculpture nearly didn't make it to the winners' podium for his laconic reasoning. He chose the five works "because I liked them". "In fact," says Hubbard, "it is very emotionally coherent and talks subtly about human frailty. The inclusion of Bread Stair raised the emotional and metaphoric stakes of the whole collection."

As the successful amateur collectors move into the world of real collecting, Hubbard offers them some words of wisdom. "My advice to the winners would be simply to keep looking and reading. Knowledge of contemporary art and a discerning eye are essential to any good collection. Inform the head and then follow with the heart."

www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk