The ICA in London is embarking on a mission to find and help develop the future of the British avant-garde, led by Director Gregor Muir, known for his early championing of the YBA’s.  “If we are looking for something radical, it is not always about shocking people. It is about being more pernicious, about getting under people’s skin,” he says. “Finding a real sub-culture is more important now than just calling something the new ‘avant-garde’. We need to hear a voice from cultures that are not represented well elsewhere.” (more…)

Artist Marc Quinn is interviewed in the Telegraph this week, as he prepares to show new work at White Cube this month.  “I’ve always loved beaches,” he says, noting the connections between the ocean’s form and landscape and his own work.  “I love that we come from the sea. I think that’s where my interest in liquid and solid comes from. The beach is where liquid and solid meet, so it has this incredible sense of possibility.” (more…)

Damien Hirst is the subject of a lengthy profile in The Guardian this week, exploring his often overlooked role in curating and presenting the work of the YBA’s in their early years, and his soon to open London gallery.  “I’ve always wanted a gallery like Saatchi, the original Boundary Road,” he says. (more…)

Jake and Dinos Chapman are profiled in The Guardian this week, discussing their sprawling Hell installation, and the countless horrors occurring across its expanse of miniature figures, and the first draft of the work’s destruction in a massive warehouse fire.  “We heard the Momart warehouse was on fire and drove up to have a giggle because we thought it was full of other YBA art. Then we got a call saying Hell was in there,” Jake Chapman says.  “We just laughed: two years to make, two minutes to burn. A smart-assed journo phoned up and said: ‘Is it true that Hell is on fire?’ It was fantastic – like a work of art still in the process of being made, even as it burnt.” (more…)

Yinka Shonibare MBE, Ballet God (Apollo) (2015)

Currently on view at James Cohan Gallery is Yinka Shonibare MBE’s new body of work, including exuberant, playful sculptures along with digital prints.  The UK-based Nigerian-born artist came into recognition with his hybrid sculptures, utilizing Dutch wax fabric, a textile material of complex patterns and tight allusions to colonialism due to its long, bureaucratic history of trade.  In his recent exhibition, Shonibare weighs on a broader issue compared to his familiar themes of colonialism, political supremacy and racial identity, looking at global climate changes and growing effects of these permutations throughout the world. (more…)

Jenny Saville is interviewed this week in The Telegraph, discussing her painting techniques, and love of the human form.  “I paint flesh because I’m human,” she says. “If you work in oil, as I do, it comes naturally. Flesh is just the most beautiful thing to paint.” (more…)

Sarah Lucas, Dacre (2013) via Osman Yerebakan

Britain introduced many significant female artists in the 90s during its highly touted YBA (Young British Artists) era, woman who presented feminine sexuality not as an object, but as a subject in itself. Commonly interpreted as a tool or a meta for male artists, female sexuality was reformed into ‘a maker’ that creates art alongside a group of female artists (with inspirations from pioneers such as Louise Bourgeois or Georgia O’Keeffe), instead of being the object that the hand works on. Artists like Tracey Emin, Sam Taylor-Wood and Sarah Lucas presented bodies of works that came from the essence of being a woman by explicating femininity in unorthodox ways.

Sarah Lucas, Priapus (2013) and Chicken Knickers (2014) via Osman Yerebakan (more…)

Cosmopolitan Casino in Las Vegas will be showing a selection of LED installations by Tracey Emin, featuring animated versions of the artist’s illuminated text works scrawling themselves across the building’s enormous screens.  “It’s fantastic that the hotel wants to do this,” Emin says. “It’s not about selling things. It’s about love.” (more…)

Damien Hirst is reportedly planning to write his autobiography, despite the artist’s claim that he can’t remember most of his twenties.  The artist announced his intent to pen the story of his hard partying and decadence as part of the YBA’s early this week, but has admitted on several occasions that about ten years of his life are a complete blank, due in part to the same hard living he plans to document. (more…)

Sarah Lucas, NOB (Installation View), via Secession

Vienna’s Secession gallery is currently presenting a show of new work by artist Sarah Lucas, including a set of large-format sculptures, an immersive installation and a number of large scale photographs that fit well within Lucas’s well-established body of work.  Exploring the political and psychological affects of various objects and sexual innuendoes, this time focused on the male genitalia, Lucas’s exhibition, titled Nob closes next week.

Gelatin, NOB (Installation View), via Secession (more…)

Two of Damien Hirst’s Dot artworks have been stolen from a West London art gallery, valued at about $54,000.  Police believe that a single person stole the two prints from the Exhibitionist Gallery, where gallery manager, Nathan Engelbrecht, told the BBC that he was scouring around “trying to find new artwork for the Christmas season.’’  (more…)

Brothers Jake and Dinos Chapman are the subject of the Financial Times’ ongoing “Lunch with the FT” series, talking about their early work, and response to criticism that their work has scarcely changed in the past years.  “But it’s the same criticism you could level at Mark Rothko,” The brothers collectively ask. “Is it imperative for the artist to be novel?” (more…)

Artist Damien Hirst at Blain Southern Gallery. All photos by Caroline Claisse for Art Observed.

As Frieze London prepares to open its doors to the press and VIPs tomorrow morning in Regent’s Park, gallerists around the city are aiming to pull out all the stops in attracting collectors during the week’s events.  Such seemed to be the case with Blain|Southern‘s Candy, a blockbuster exhibition of works by Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Damien Hirst focusing on the artists’ shared material and aesthetic interests in the sugary snack as artistic medium, which opened last night.

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Jake & Dinos Chapman, The Sum of All Evil (Installation View), courtesy White Cube Hong Kong

Currently at Hong Kong’s White Cube, British artists Jake & Dinos Chapman are exhibited The Sum of All Evil, the artists’ first in China, including a group of lurid, bizarre dioramas alongside their familiar series of “reworked paintings.”

Jake & Dinos Chapman, One Day You Will No Longer Be Loved (that it should come to this…) (2010), via White Cube

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Tracey Emin recently sat down with The New York Times for a brief interview, discussing aging, her current show at Lehmann Maupin, and the valuation of her work as a woman.  “My work rarely comes up in secondary market, so it means that my prices stay low. But I’ll tell you about my contemporaries — if I sold every single thing in my whole show, it is still not as much as one painting of my male contemporaries.” (more…)

In a recent magazine interview with Vanity Fair, YBA veteran Tracey Emin has called out critics for judging her work much more harshly than her male counterparts.  She also discussed Roman Standard, her recent project for Petrosino Square in New York that placed a single bird on top of a 13 foot pole. “What I’m saying through the piece is that strength isn’t always about being big.”  She says. (more…)

Tracey Emin was granted a Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (CBE) for her outstanding contributions to the arts. “I think they pushed me in at the deep end. But I’m absolutely thrilled. It’s been insane trying to keep it a secret but I’m really looking forward to seeing the look on my mum’s face”, Emin said. (more…)

‬In a new interview with The Independent, Sarah Lucas does little to restrict her opinion of the art of fellow Young British Artists including that of Tracey Emin “[her work is] a bit second-rate, really, to exploit all that personal stuff”. “Tracey likes a lot of drama, which I don’t really.”

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‪‬In his first interview in 10 years, White Cube founder and renowned art mogul Jay Jopling addresses his ability to walk the line of ‘privilege and populism.’ He explains to the Financial Times: “I always liked to collide the establishment with the avant-garde.”
[AO Newslink]

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‪A new generation of ‘Young British Artists’: Jonny Briggs, Gabriella Boyd, Adeline de Monseignat, Max Dovey, Catherine Parsonage and Alison Stolwood feature in the 40-person Catlin Guide 2012, a subset of the London Art Fair [AO Newslink]

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Charles Saatchi, photo via Welt

British art collector, Charles Saatchi, famous for launching the now established careers of “Young British Artists” of the 1990’s such as Damien Hirst and Tracy Emin and others, is set to preside over a new reality television show on BBC2, described as the Art X Factor.

In an attempt to be the next YBA Hirst or Emin, artists over the age of 18 and residing in the UK will submit their work online.  All artistic genres, from painting to conceptual, will be accepted.  A panel of art world experts will narrow the entries down to approximately 50 which will then be presented to Saatchi in the form of an exhibition.  Saatchi, himself, will then select six of these artists to participate in the TV show “Saatchi’s Best of British.”

Charles Saatchi is indisputably one of the most significant figures in the art world.  In 1970, Saatchi founded the advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi with his brother Maurice.  By 1986 Saatchi and Saatchi grew to be the largest ad agency in the world, with over 600 offices.  Yet Saatchi is as much famous perhaps for his direct influence in the art market, establishing the Saatchi Gallery in 1985 in London.  He recently opened his new space in October of last year at Duke of York Headquarters Building in Chelsea, London (as covered by Art Observed here).  In 1997 he mounted an exhibition at the Royal Academy titled Sensation, which travelled to Berlin and New York ruffling feathers along the way and causing the regognition of the artists in the show to in most cases shift to an entirely higher plane.

Jonathan Jones: Reality TV has nothing to offer the art world [Guardian]
Saatchi to front art talent show [BBC]
BBC and Charles Saatchi Launch Reality Show [Art Daily]
Charles Saatchi to host Art X-Factor [Times]
TV show hunts for next Damien Hirst [Metro]
Reality show taps Saatchi [CBC]
X Factor for budding artists [Marie Claire]

More after the jump… (more…)