Focus on the human body

Associated media

Rosalind Ormiston reports on ‘Body Language’, a show of international art at London’s Saatchi Gallery

It is always a pleasure to visit the light-filled, spacious Saatchi Gallery in Chelsea, London, in the former Duke of York barracks.  In 'Body Language', the gallery's latest exhibition (on display until 23 March 2014), 19 artists focus on the human body. Thirteen of the artists are American, the others are from Europe, Russia and Japan.

In Gallery 1, American artist Henry Taylor introduces us to his interpretation of body language through symbols of private and public space and a slice of 21st-century social realism. In the large acrylic-on-canvas painting Walking with Vito (2008) two young black men in casual sport clothes saunter along the street with a large mastiff dog. A white towel draped over the shoulder of one man accentuates his naked upper body in the heat of the day. His companion makes eye contact with us, the spectators. Behind them on the opposite side of the street a car is parked by a large 'No Parking' sign printed on the wall.  Close to them is an advertisement for wigs. Taylor's vibrant painting reveals the immediacy of everyday life as much as Gustave Caillebotte's  Paris Street, Rainy Day, 1877, captured a snapshot of 19th-century Paris.  Nearby, I Belong (2011), a mixed-media assemblage, incorporates small table legs supporting six boxes of 'High Gravity Lager' with a long black wig perched on top of the boxes. It leaves the spectator to make the links between body, culture, and lifestyle.

Taylor's work sets the scene for the exhibition, which focuses on the body in a diverse variety of interpretations, works that bring the real and surreal together.

A surreal floating dreamscape is created in I See Season (2010), in oil on canvas, one of Japanese artist Makiko Kudo's large-scale paintings in Gallery 2. Here children float or walk through a highly coloured, lush, dense landscape. Comparison could be made with Paul Gauguin's semi-fictive Tahitian works, as Kudo's paintings similarly engage and disturb, inviting the viewer to enter a different world.

The body in death is made immediate in Denis Tarasov's large-scale series of photographs Untitled (from the ‘Essence’ series) (2012), in Gallery 5. Tarasov photographed many gravestones in Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine, and Yekaterinburg, Russia. The ‘Essence’ series focuses on portrait images of deceased people, young and old, reproduced in an engraving on each gravestone, copied from a photograph of them taken during their lives. It is a fascinating collection of differences, a young man with his prized motor car, an older woman surrounded by her favourite things. The materiality of their worlds is identified in brand logos and objects, which categorize how they wanted to be identified. The 40 works dominate the walls of this gallery but filling the central space is Marianne Vitale's sculptural installation Markers (2011), which complements Tarasov's art in its symbolism of grave stones. Vitale's heavy wooden assemblages made from lumber reclaimed from demolished factories and warehouses, associates the graveyard with a mixed crowd of people. The upright angular rectangles of wood, identify past lives as bodies of work.

In Gallery 7 the grand-scale of Helen Verhoeven's two paintings Event One and Event Two, 2008, mirror the grand scenes within them. A gathering of people in opulent settings draw the spectator closer to study the groups of figures depicted. Where are they? What are they assembled for? The works could be studied for hours, each viewer concocting a different narrative to match the events taking place.

The capaciousness of the Saatchi gallery rooms allow it to show vast artworks and sculptures like these with space to appreciate each one, but equally the space can enhance the experience of circling smaller works such as the two unusual sculptures by Kasper Kovitz, Carnalitos (Arana), and Carnalitos (Unamuno) (2010), in Gallery 7. They are small works each made from a leg of Iberian ham, with their hambone bases set in concrete slabs. From a lump of ham Kovitz sculpts a human head and body standing precariously on an exposed hambone leg.  In its immediacy each sculpture engages one’s attention, prompting one to consider why Kovitz chose this medium. His art makes one think of the possibilities of meaning. In Spanish carnalitos means close friends or brothers; its language root links to the word carne (meat). Kovitz states that each figure relates to a specific person in the Basque separatist struggle against Spain, namely political opposites Sabino Arana (1865–1903), a forefather of the Basque movement, and poet Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936). This knowledge allows the works to be interpreted as symbols of ideology and motivation.

A favourite of mine was Michael Cline's art, which included That's That (2008). The curator links Cline's work to the interwar paintings of Georg Grosz and Otto Dix.  For me they compared in style to paintings by Stanley Spencer, each highlighting the fascination of other people's lives, at times mundane or shocking, always infinitely absorbing. Other artists must be mentioned for their works are worth a visit to the Saatchi Gallery too. They are Chantal Joffe, Francis Upritchard and Nicole Eisenman, Nathan Mabry, Eddie Martinez and Dana Schultz, Justin Matherly, Tanyth Berkeley, Alexander Tinei and Andra Ursula, Amy Bessone and Jansson Stegner.