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The Saatchi Gallery 100

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The Saatchi Gallery 100

[ 53:22 ]

"Art that was ""headbuttingly impossible to ignore"" is how Charles Saatchi describes the work that intrigued him as he started to collect British art in the early 1990s. Damien Hirst's giant shark in formaldehyde, Tracey Emin's unmade bed and a chilling portrait of Myra Hindley by Marcus Harvey are among the artworks that have since become icons of the decade. The Saatchi Gallery, now in the former County Hall in London, is a permanent home for a changing selection of Saatchi's world-famous collection. The Saatchi Gallery 100 is a fast-paced and fascinating film featuring one hundred of these artworks, accompanied by reflections and anecdotes from the artists themselves. Sarah Lucas' confrontational self-portraits are among the highlights, as are the bold paintings of Gary Hume, photographs by Richard Billingham, sculptures of genetically mutated children by Jake and Dinos Chapman, and many more. Like the collection itself, the film offers a unique understanding of why London has become the centre of the international art world over the past decade - and how art in Britain continues to surprise and challenge and delight."

01:00:20

The Art of Henry Moore
"Winner of the Prix du meilleur film éducatif at the 25th International Festival of Films on Art in Montreal 2007. Henry Moore is arguably the greatest sculptor of the twentieth century. Born in Yorkshire in 1898, he died after an exceptionally productive career in 1986. His large-scale sculptures are centrally sited in many major cities across Europe and North America. Indeed it can sometimes seem as if his work has become so familiar that we fail to notice its beauties and its boldness. The Art of Henry Moore aims to rediscover the artist by returning to the works themselves - his sculptures, drawings and graphics - and to Moore's own thoughts about them. Archive photographs from the collection at the Henry Moore Foundation complement the artworks, newly filmed across Britain, in France and the USA. Many of the artist's most significant sculptures are featured, from the earliest models of the 1920s to the monuments of his final years. Drawings from each stage of his career, including the famous tube shelter sketches made during the Blitz, are also included. The specially recorded soundtrack is drawn solely from Moore's words in interviews, articles and letters."

26:41

theEYE: William Turnbull
William Turnbull is one of Britain’s most distinguished sculptors and painters. In the late 1940s he studied art in London and then spent time in Paris, and ever since he has rigorously explored a limited number of archetypal forms as well as the fundamentals of art’s languages. Over more than fifty years William Turnbull has returned again and again to the head and the mask, to the standing figure and the horse, as well as to possibilities of pared-down, often monochromatic painting. His simple objects, which draw on both primitive and classical ideas, often combine presence and poetry in unique ways. This rare interview with the artist was filmed alongside an extensive retrospective exhibition at Yorkshire Sculpture Park in 2005. Works in bronze, wood and stone as well as (from a period in the 1960s) in brightly-coloured steel are seen at their very best in both light-drenched interiors and in the park’s sweeping landscapes.

26:25

theEYE: Marc Quinn
Marc Quinn remains best known for his sculptures cast from parts of his body. The first of these, Self (initially cast in 1991), was created with nine pints of his frozen blood. Yet, as this profile demonstrates, his art over the past decade has embraced an exciting and diverse range of materials, including lead, ice, wax, glass, frozen flowers and even DNA. His sculptures include both figurative and semi-abstract forms, but each engages with his key preoccupations: life and mortality, self and identity, nature and the world of science. His drawings and photographs similarly teem with ideas about being alive - and about facing death - in today’s world. In this profile, Marc Quinn speaks eloquently and thoughtfully about many of his key works, including his recent series of classical marble portraits of amputees and people born without limbs, as well as the moving portrait of his son Lucas as a baby modelled from frozen placenta.

48:09

The Art of Barbara Hepworth
Barbara Hepworth is a major British artist of the twentieth century. The Art of Barbara Hepworth reveals the beauty and the power of her sculptures, and the ideas which motivated her throughout her creative life. Extensive exhibitions at Tate St Ives and Yorkshire Sculpture Park, and the permanent display at the Barbara Hepworth Museum, provide sumptuous settings for many of the works included in this film. Other sculptures have been specially filmed in the locations for which they were made. This revealing and complex exploration of Barbara Hepworth's work features her naturalistic carvings of the 1920s and increasingly abstract sculptures of the 1930s, the ambitious post-war works in wood, stone and bronze, her monumental public commissions and the strikingly diverse creations of her final years. On this revealing and complex exploration of Barbara Hepworth's work features two parallel soundtracks. One is taken entirely from the artist's own words, drawn from interviews and letters, and newly recorded by Gina McKee. The other features commentary on Barbara Hepworth's art from curators Penelope Curtis and Chris Stephens, and from the art historian Sir Alan Bowness, who is the artist's son-in-law.

28:32

theEYE: Anthony Caro
In the early 1960s Anthony Caro led a revolution in sculpture in Britain. His abstract steel constructions, often painted in bold colours, forged a new and internationally influential sculptural language. In the years since his fertile and diverse practice has consistently challenged and extended what sculpture is, and what it might be. At the age of 80, Anthony Caro remains intensely active, working each day in his studio and overseeing every detail of an extensive retrospective at Tate. Preparations for the show are featured in this profile, along with many of his major works, filmed in Britain, Germany and the United States. In interview Anthony Caro speaks about the development of his art from the bronze figures of the 1950s through the many variations of his work with metals, his hybrids of sculpture and architecture, and his recent large-scale, multi-part responses to Old Master painting and the worlds of myth and Christianity. The film is a portrait of an artist of great distinction whose inventiveness and creative vigour are undiminished.

26:11

theEYE: Tony Cragg
In a distinguished career since the mid-1970s, Tony Cragg has produced a strikingly diverse range of sculptures in the widest variety of materials. His prolific output embraces organic and industrial creations, abstract and near-figurative images, delicate, powerful, immediate and yet elusive forms. The sculptor, he says, "looks for all the forms that don't exist."Filmed in the UK and Germany, where Tony Cragg has lived since the early 1980s, this profile features works produced over the past twenty-five years for both gallery and public contexts. In interview, Cragg discusses his working methods, his fascination with different materials and his fundamental commitment to sculpture as an artform. He speaks of his passion for the significance of sculpture, for its oddities, its quirkiness and its potential discoveries in today's overwhelmingly utilitarian world.

52:59

The Art of Francis Bacon
"Francis Bacon is the essential British painter of the twentieth century. From the end of the Second World War until his death in 1992, he created an extraordinary body of intense and uncompromising figure paintings and portraits. Drawing on diverse influences including Picasso, Velasquez’s portrait of Pope Innocent X, the photographs of Eadweard Muybridge and Sergei Eisenstein’s film Battleship Potemkin, Bacon undertook a pitiless analysis in paint of himself and his friends, of the human body, and of our place in a godless universe. This film explores many of his key canvases which have been newly filmed in HDTV. The works are complemented solely with Bacon’s own words, recorded by Derek Jacobi. The artist’s biography is outlined, but the focus is on his ideas: his thoughts about his work, his reflections about how and why he paints. The result is a rigorous and revealing portrait of one of the few artists who has truly changed the way we see and understand ourselves."

26:28

theEYE: Tracey Emin
Although at times obscured by the artist's celebrity, the art of Tracey Emin is serious and focussed, challenging and at times startlingly beautiful. In this film, she speaks frankly about her career, the craft of her immensely varied work, and the immediate, personal themes with which she engages: autobiography, memory, desire, and identity. Many of her best-known works, including Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995 (1995) and My Bed (1998), are illustrated and discussed, as is a wide selection of drawings, prints, paintings, neons, appliqué blankets and installations. "I always say if I didn’t make art, I’d probably be dead," she reflects. "But let’s be more realistic about that. If I didn’t make art and I’d done well in life, then I might have gone into retail. I would probably be the person in the shop that would be always organising the displays, and always making the noticeboard look nice in the canteen, stuff like that. I’m a genuinely creative person." Please note that this video contains explicit images and adult language featured in artworks by Tracey Emin.

25:21

theEYE: Chris Ofili
In 2003 Chris Ofili created the spectacular installation within reach for the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Combining a cycle of paintings depicting lovers in a Paradise-like garden with a shimmering glass dome, Ofili plunged visitors into disorienting spaces of dense colour and enveloping light. Shot in London, Germany and Venice, this film relates the creation of Within Reach. Chris Ofili's reflections on the process are complemented by interviews with his collaborator in Venice, architect David Adjaye, and the structural engineer from Arup Associates, who helped realise the complex dome. Also included is an exploration of The Upper Room, an installation of 13 exquisite canvases by Ofili, which was first shown in 2002. Both this and Within Reach are about "trying to create an atmosphere for people to feel somehow out of themselves." His aim, the artist explains, is to "do something that is sincerely interesting and can honestly enhance the experience of looking."

25:28

theEYE: Yinka Shonibare
Yinka Shonibare is a painter, photographer and installation artist, whose art is influenced by both the cultures of Nigeria, where he grew up, and Britain, where he studied and now lives. He has exhibited widely all over the world, and this film profile includes exhibitions filmed in London, Rotterdam and Stockholm. His paintings and his sculptural installations make extensive use of dyed fabrics, which became popular in West Africa after independence. But many of these textiles betray Indonesian influences, are manufactured in Holland and are purchased by the artist in Brixton in south London. The complexities of nationality and identity, of history and ethnicity, post-colonialism and today's global economy, form the intellectual and aesthetic arena in which Shonibare works. His works have a strongly contemporary feel, but at the same time they engage with the traditions and masterworks of western art history. The results are witty and playful, sensuous and poetic.

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