British art's new order arrives at the Saatchi Gallery

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There is always something special about visiting the Saatchi Gallery.  Artworks are displayed in spacious galleries with natural light flooding the building. There is room to stand back and take in large sculptures and installations without needing to peer over the shoulder of the spectator in front of you. (Though I do love smaller galleries too.) The display of art in ‘New Order: British Art Today’, is no exception and Charles Saatchi is on form, choosing a diverse group of 17 emerging artists with visual compositions that capture your attention – some repel, some make you smile – in drawing, painting, photography, and sculpture. This is new British art with a trace of humour.

James Capper (b.1987), a Londoner, kick-starts the show with ‘Nipper (Long Reach)’, 2012 (130 x 32 x 80cm; base: 130x 40 x 100cm), a giant pair of pincers, in painted steel, hydraulics and plaster, resting casually on a plinth. There is something about the size of the pincers that repels and attracts at the same time. Capper has been exhibiting since 2008. His interest is in engineering and industrial machinery. I think size matters to Capper, there is nothing small about his sculptures or his ideas; his works, reconstructed moveable machines, make you think about different levels of association between engineering and sculpture.

Steve Allan (b.1984), from Aberdeen, creates large paintings that look like prints from giant woodblocks, the images – banana people in action – look scratched into the surface. Who could not like the merriment of his ‘bananamen’ in We’re all in this together, 2012, oil on canvas (190 x 250cm), but is there a hidden message? Charlie Billingham (b.1984), another Londoner, reaches back to the Regency period in a pastiche of the Prince Regent, a roly-poly depiction in A Voluptuary under the Horrors of Digestion, 2012 (180 x 300 cm), oil on canvas, Billingham’s stretched-out version of caricaturist James Gillray’s 1792 witty cartoon. He fills a wall with a row of pastel-coloured paintings depicting bums in baggy britches, and wigs and bonnets, legs and florid faces, caricatures of Regency fashion. Close by is his six-leaf folding screen of 12 oil paintings on canvas Three Graces/Fountains Screen, 2012 (172 x 348cm). The stand-alone screen, painted on both sides, is an intimate gathering of undressed bodies. More play-on-history is present in the sculpture Myth Interrupted, 2011, plastic and cast iron, 120 45 x 59 cm, by James Balmforth (b.1980, Plymouth). The brightly painted iron griffin, minus one wing fallen off to reveal a rusted interior, plays on image as a symbol of power now reduced to useless ornament.

Around one-third of the artists are women. Tereza Zelenkova (b.1985, Ostrava, Czech Republic) is a photographer. Her strength lies in choosing subjects that unnerve and disturb, not at first glance but on closer observation. Here, Crocodiles, 2012, framed silver gelatin print, 127 x101.6cm, captures a mass of writhing crocodiles’ living in close proximity, sliding across each other’s fat bodies, the crusty chunkiness of their scaly skin accentuated in the black and white image. What is not known from the photograph but told to us, is that the crocodiles live on a vast chicken farm in the Czech Republic (Zelenkova’s homeland), and are kept in captivity to eat unsaleable chickens. ‘Cometes’, 2012, framed silver gelatin print, 127 x 101.6cm, depicts a woman caught in the flashlights of a paparazzi-type photograph. Standing with her head forwards, her body length head of hair hides her face. The impulse is to want to know more. Why is she there? What is she doing? This is Zelonka’s skill, ‘to complicate the act of looking’.

Wendy Mayer (b.1975), from Wales, exhibits doll-like dressed mannequins, which look pretty but are strangely creepy. In Fly Away Peter, 2012, two small children sit on a toy box. As they are installed at floor level one needs to kneel down to observe them closely, which is Mayer’s intention, to interact at a child’s level of seeing. On the bodies are giant X-stiches, to pinpoint parts of the body. On display too is a small group, a family trio, mother, father, baby in Gold Watch, 2012; and the work that perhaps captures most attention, After Louise, 2012.  At floor level a woman’s head with beret sits atop a giant round pin-cushion of dark material stuck with super-size sewing pins and threaded needles; it is Mayer’s homage to the French sculptor Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010).

There are just a few examples of artists’ works on display. ‘New Order: British Art Now’ is a positive capsule of British Art today. While some of the works have ambiguous political and social messages hidden within for the spectator to decipher, many are ‘art for art’s sake’, to simply enjoy.