Saatchi Gallery

The Saatchi Gallery is a London based gallery for contemporary art, opened by millionaire art collector Charles Saatchi in 1985 in order to exhibit his personal collection to the public. It has occupied different premises, first in north London, then the South Bank by the Thames and currently at the Duke of York's Headquarters in the London borough of Chelsea. Saatchi's collection, and hence the gallery's shows, has had distinct phases, starting with American artists and Minimalism, which featured Donald Judd, Brice Marden and Cy Twombly and American pop artist Andy Warhol. At the end of 1989, a series of exhibitions featured School of London artists including Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach, Leon Kossoff and Howard Hodgkin. During the previous year, Saatchi sold the majority of his American collection and invested the proceeds in the works of the Young British Artists. The core of the artists had been brought together by Damien Hirst in 1988 in a seminal show called 'Freeze'. Saatchi augmented this with his own choice of purchases by unknowns from art colleges and artist-run spaces in London. His first showing of the YBA's was in 1992, where the star exhibit was the now iconic Damien Hirst container of a shark in formaldehyde and entitled 'The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living'.

Saatchi's promotion of artists such as Jenny Saville, Sarah Lucas, Gavin Turk, brothers Jake and Dinos Chapman and Rachel Whiteread and later Tracey Emin dominated the art scene throughout the nineties and brought them to a worldwide audience. In September 1997 'Sensation' opened at the Royal Academy to much controversy and showed 110 works by 42 artists from the Saatchi collection. The show also toured to The National Galerie at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin in the autumn, and then on to the Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York, creating unprecedented political and media controversy and becoming a touchstone for debate about the rights and wrongs of contemporary art. The Saatchi Gallery has been a major influence on art in Britain since its opening. It has also had a history of media controversy, which it has courted, receiving extremes of critical reaction. Many artists shown at the gallery are unknown not only to the general public but also to the commercial art world. In 2010 it was announced that the gallery would be given to the British public, becoming the Museum of Contemporary Art for London.