Private View at Saatchi- Body Language

Body Language (noun):
"the conscious and unconscious movements and postures by which attitudes and feelings are communicated."

Last Wednesday evening I attended a private view at the Saatchi Gallery of their new exhibition "Body Language". The exhibition included the works of, respectively:

1. Henry Taylor
2. Makiko Kudo
3. Nathan Mabry
4. Eddie Martinez
5. Dana Shutz
6. Helen Verhoeven
7. Justin Matherly
8. Denis Tarasov
9. Marianne Vitale
10. Chantal Joffe
11. Francis Upritchard
12. Michael Cline
13. Nicole Eisenman
14. Kasper Kovitz
15. Tanyth Berkeley
16. Alexander Tinei
17. Amy Bessone
18. Jansson Stegner
19. Andra Ursuta

My two favourite pieces were by far Marianne Vitale's "Markers" (the gravestones pictured above) and Tanyth Berkeley's "Grace in Window" (last three photographs above). Vitale's work was so different to everything else; the physical presence of the gravestones in the room with you as you mill about in the room is both eerie but spiritual. "Their component parts, the reside of retired warriors: notches, burn-marks, old nails, faded paint. The past leaves its traces, as it does on the human body; decomposition and deterioration, nature reclaiming its own, is implied in the material itself," is written in the exhibition guide. 

Furthermore, Berkeley's photographs are captivating images of a selection of women, both biological and transsexual, that "revisits the heightened artifice of the Renaissance portrait...Her subjects, people Berkeley met by chance on the street or subway and asked to pose as they wished, embody appeals to a transgressive form of beauty".

It's an exhibition well worth going to.

Ruby