In a new initiative to generate more exposure for the artists in Saatchi Online and to spotlight their work to as wide an audience as possible, they have created SHOWDOWN at the Saatchi gallery. Showdown is for all registered Saatchi Online and Stuart artists to enter their works for visitors to score. The winner of the final head-to-head vote will receive £1000 and the runner up will receive £750. The winning work will go on display at the new Saatchi gallery.

HOW IT WORKS

To submit your artwork in SHOWDOWN, you need to be a registered Saatchi Online or Stuart artist.

The process is as follows: on Monday mornings from 9 am (UK time) registered artists on Saatchi Online and Stuart have until 6 pm Sunday night (UK time) to load an image for Showdown

Voting takes place for the next seven days (Monday 9 am until the following Monday 9 am UK time). The two artworks with the highest overall scores go head-to-head. Visitors then vote on the two head-to-head works for a further seven days.

After twelve rounds all the head-to-head victors enter a knockout phase, until the final showdown, to choose an overall winner. Throughout the seven day head-to-head vote, artists are able to enter one of their works for the next round of the contest, so that the process is continuous. Artists are able to enter every round of the contest that they wish to.

VOTING system

Any visitor to the site can rate and vote for artworks in Showdown. All visitors are free to vote on all artworks, scoring them from one to ten (one being the lowest score and ten the highest). Although visitors can vote for as many artworks that have been entered as they like, to prevent multiple voting by one person for one work, only one vote per individual artwork will be accepted from each visitor.

The artworks are displayed randomly and constantly rotate. Each time an artwork is rated by clicking on a star to register a vote a new random artwork is displayed. To see more images please click on the ‘Click here to see more images’ displayed on the SHOWDOWN homepage.

If you have already rated an artwork, your rating will be displayed, and this rating cannot be changed.

Vote for Finalists artwork on Showdownat Saatchi Gallery to determine the winner. It is for all registered artists to enter their artworks for visitors to Vote.

Commanding with a painterly dynamism, Thomas Helbig’s abstractions strive to capture the essence of power. Within his raw canvases, Helbig alludes to the unwieldy forces of nature, and the representational modes used to harness its vastness. Stylistically, Helbig recycles art history, implicating visual language as reflective of ideology: from the political subtexts of abstraction, to the religious spiritualism of romanticism. In Seele, Helbig creates a field of high drama, his blacks and blues churning with the unpredictable depth of night. Reminiscent of Turner’s climactic impressionism, Helbig’s Seele suggests both haunting landscape and stormy psychology.

Reworking the theme of Picasso’s Girl Before A Mirror, Thomas Helbig’s Wilde Mit Spiegel sets up a questionable allure, positing the perception of beauty as a consequence of excess. Hidden within an abstract field of wild brushwork and gory splatters, Helbig paints a figure, profiled as grotesque caricature. His Holbien-ish shrew is defined by her painterly construction, the mimetic qualities of the media bubbling as boils and warts, crackling like matted hair; above her head a chandelier of gobby yellow suggests tarnished halo. To the left, an orange vignette doubles as figurative mirror and comic speech bubble brandishing a sketchy image of pleasantry.

Thomas Helbig’s Jung Frau offers a morbid fascination. Using the textural contrasts of materials, Helbig creates a biomorphic abstraction veering between charred and fossilised remain and science fiction species. Embedding smooth moulded forms in rough globular material, Jung Frau possesses a tactile physicality at odds with itself: fragile and brutal, elevated and primitive. Coated in high gloss black paint, Helbig’s sculpture is both sinister and humorous, suggesting apocalyptic narratives that are glamorous and abject.

Conclusion:

At first glance Thomas Helbig’s sculptures appear to be futuristic ruins; bizarre and broken finds hinting at some remote gothic civilisation, glorifying its defunct authority.

what to Do Next. . .

Read more information about Thomas Helbig paintaings and ehibitions at

http://www. saatchi-gallery. co. uk/artists/thomas_helbig. htm

Daniel Richter’s Jawohl und Gomorrah possesses an operatic quality. Borrowing themes from both Christianity and German history, Richter constructs his contemporary scene with theatrical flair: his figures are staged in Baroque composition, their outlandish costumes and mask-like faces lend an element of surreal spectacle. The fervent emotion of grand drama is carried through Richter’s frenetic style of painting: thick brushwork battles with translucent drizzles and impassioned smears; acid tones are electrified against the sombre ground. Reminiscent of Ensor’s nightmarish crowds, Richter infuses this street scene with apocalyptic celebration.

Richter’s work is often read with political motive. Working in the genre of epic historical painting, his images are fraught with a painterly anxiety. His work is infused with an apocalyptic energy, reflective of media induced paranoia. Beneath his highly seductive surfaces lies the portent of instability, violence, alienation and ideological subversion of a contemporary world in constant flux. Taking his subjects from pictures found in newspapers, comics, album and book covers, Richter repositions contemporary media imagery in the form of theatrical tableaux that are fantastical and timeless.

His nightmarish scenes are both terrifying and beautiful: rebellious mobs attacking the Berlin wall are staged with medieval religious zeal; gatherings of vagabonds glow with paranormal threat. Laden with the weight of implied history, Richter’s scenes extend beyond emblematic reading; their narratives take on the qualities of magical realism, extending a shiver of supernatural barbarism to depictions of current affairs.

SOLO EXHIBITIONS

2005

• Daniel Richter Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin

• Daniel Richter Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg

2004

• The Morning After David Zwirner, New York

• Daniel Richter: Pink Flag, White Horse The Power Plant, Toronto

2003

• Hirn Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin

• Hearn Galerie Benier/Eliades, Athens

2002

• Grünspan, K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf

2001

• La Cause du Peuple Patrick Painter Inc. , Los Angeles

• Billard um halb Zehn, Kunsthalle zu Kiel, Kiel, Germany

Conclusions:

Richter’s canvases are imbued with an alchemic affinity for paint. Copious techniques and applications deceptively flaunt the process of making, yet remain elusive in their overwhelming complexity.

What to Do Next. . .

Find more information about Daniel Richter Exhibitions or looking for his paintings please visit us on http://www. saatchi-gallery. co. uk/artists/daniel_richter. htm

Jonathan Meese draws from German Expressionism, a movement dominated by the horrors of war and social discontent, especially in painting and film. It was strongly concerned with the unique vision of the artist: a conception of artist-as-diviner that Meese readily embraces. In Catdim, Meese presents himself as an exotic oracle. His flat black mask sits with elegant form over his energetic gold colour-field, reminiscent of Emil Nolde’s Prophet. Meese infuses his images with immediacy and pathos, and his use of these values in a contemporary context lends authenticity to his B-movie alter-ego.

Jonathan Meese is a champion of the lost cause. His personal interests reverberate throughout his paintings: comic books, horror films, medieval crusades and outsider art merge into a compendium of morality and epic failure. In his paintings, clear-cut roles of good vs. evil are confused, ironic propaganda is served up with homebrew conviction, and malevolent knaves become heroes of the disenfranchised. In Der Suppenpharao, Meese invents a protagonist of questionable intent. Based on Zardoz’s savage executioner, his masked gladiator-cum-superman stars in a poster-like composition, brimming with promise of pulp fiction drama. Meese incorporates himself into his fantasy, as a tribe of snout-nosed nymphs approving the impending carnage.

In his self-portraits, Meese exaggerates his real-life ‘wild-man’ features, his image continuously mutating through a cast of characters – from demons to divas – to develop potential narratives exploring the nature of power and conspiracy underlying contemporary mythology. Through his many reinventions, Meese replicates celebrity image manufacturing to style himself as a cult figure: both symptom and cure of a corrupted belief system. His narrative works play out B-movie fantasies in feudal tableaux, hailing religion and politics as punk-style forgeries. Collectively Meese’s works operate as meta-narratives; feeding the fictional legacy of the artist as an almighty and immortal entity.

Conclusion:

Jonathan Meese Is Mother Parsifal set the young artist alone against the well-over-five hours of Wagner’s slow-moving epic in the vast scenery store-house of Berlin’s Staatsoper Unter den Linden.

what to Do Next. . .

Find more information about Jonathan Meese Exhibitions or looking for his paintings please visit us on http://www. saatchi-gallery. co. uk/artists/jonathan_meese. htm

Marc Swanson art work

Marc Swanson’s Fits and Starts is a sculpture of a life-size deer, entirely encrusted in rhinestone crystals. The deer is portrayed mid-leap, its hind legs in the air and its head turned, as if glancing back at a person or another animal in pursuit. Swanson, who views the sculpture in terms of fantasy and desire, notes that the deer is an alluring and elusive creature that is simultaneously darting away and frozen in time. The graceful sculpture suggests an unattainable object of adoration, trying to flee those who wish to approach. Swanson has made several related deer-head sculptures, which he calls his “surrogates,” encrusting the conventional hunter’s trophy with dazzling rhinestones and hanging it on the wall

About Marc Swanson Exhibitions

Marc Swanson’s second solo exhibition at Bellwether, “Live Free or Die,” was an anthem to crushed dreams and hopes for the future. Conceived as a four-part installation comprising individual artworks fitted into a loosely autobiographical scenario, the show roughly conveyed the artist’s coming to terms with his homosexuality and his politically conservative, rural New Hampshire roots. It also suggested a lapsed search for the possibility of renewal in a psychically devastated landscape.

Conclusion of this article:

Swanson’s honky-tonk environment initially seemed to be at odds with his purportedly self-revelatory intent. Each tired symbol pumped up the volume of exhausted artifice. Yet on some level, the contrivance of this deliberately awful down-and-out setting, with its dime-store mannequins and cheaply realized decor–made with, among other things, glitter, sgraffitoed Plexiglas, hockey tape, hanging T-shirts, rope nets, dirt and deerskin–seemed to offer an authentic glimpse into the artist’s sense of abject futility, Goth morbidity and misplaced projection of gay fabulousness.

Read entire article about Marc Swanson or looking for his paintings please visit us on http://www. saatchi-gallery. co. uk/artists/marc_swanson. htm

The first performances of the O. M. Theatre consisted of Hermann Nitsch and friends using animal carcasses, entrails, and blood in a ritualistic way. The cloths, bandages and other fabrics used in these performances introduced Nitsch to the idea of making paintings. 1960 saw the first exhibition of his ‘Aktion’ paintings in Vienna. In the mid-60′s Nitsch’s theatre pieces were also performed in Vienna.

His Fresco, with its connotations of martyrdom and penance, is fixed with the tortured bust of a ‘saint’, a site of devotional worship as horrifically compelling as an ossuary or catacomb. Much is made of Hermann Nitsch as cult provocateur, but he is first and foremost an artist: his performances and rituals are painstakingly planned in the context and language of art. Each ‘Aktion’ is premeditated through preparatory drawings and paintings, reflecting Hermann Nitsch’s influence by, and position within, the predominant movements spanning his career.

Nitsch plays with the symbolism of Christian ritual. Communion with real blood and real flesh means, of course, a desymbolization of the Eucharist. In this sense he acts as a consistent Protestant reaching the last limits of iconoclasm. On the other hand, this desymbolisation can be perceived as a negation of the transcendental, spiritual significance of the Eucharist. “Blood is only blood and this is the only reality of existence”. Such a belief, from the Christian point of view, is undoubtedly a satanic perversion of truth.

Conclusion:

Hermann Nitsch composed himself was becoming increasingly prominent in his performances. In 1972 he participated in Documenta V, Kassel, and staged ‘Aktions’ at the Mercer Center and Everson Museum of Art.

what to Do Next. . .

Find more information about Hermann Nitsch Exhibitions or looking for his paintings please visit us on http://www. saatchi-gallery. co. uk/artists/hermann_nitsch. htm

Stezaker has been centrally influential in a number of developments in art over the last three decades; from Conceptual Art, New Image Art through to the contemporary interest in collage. Showing first as a part of the British Conceptual Art group in ‘The New Art’, 1972 (the first Hayward Annual), Stezaker’s interest in the concept soon gave way to a long-term fascination with the image, finding new aesthetic allegiances with the image through working with found photographs and printed matter.

This fascination is translated into alterations, deletions, visual concordances and juxtapositions of disparate sources, intuitively creating new images, relationships, characters and meanings. Stezaker’s investigations continue to develop in this exhibition of new works that concentrate specifically on the portrait. In the ‘Love’ series, subtle but masterful alterations to found original film star portraits shift and magnify emotion and expression that had before only been implied, sometimes imperceptibly, in the original image. The glamorous and carefully posed faces are subtly transformed into otherworldly, uncanny beings. Playing with ideas of cubism and caricature, Stezaker’s series of black and white portraits fuse male and female faces, reflecting the idea of marriage and hybrid symmetry, but also a discord of union. Perhaps the most subtle of found image alterations are the ‘Reclined’ series;

what to Do Next. . .

Find more information about John Stezaker Exhibitions or looking for his paintings please visit us on http://www. saatchi-gallery. co. uk/artists/john_stezaker. htm

Education

1992-1995

• Oil Painting Dept of Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts, MFA

1988-1992

• Fine Arts Education Dept of Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts, BFA

Feng Zhengjie decided to take inspiration from the popular images he had grown up with in rural Sichuan. Critics are unanimous in placing Feng’s paintings in the realm of the critique of contemporary consumer societyMalicious and mischievous are the glances that seem to cross only in the series “Romantic Trip”; these fleeting looks reflect games played by young couples for whom the sole possible form of communication is loving attraction. Sparkles are covered by large sunglasses in the case of the “humanoids” which are the subject of the series “Coolness”: characters are portrayed with naked bodies and big heads, bald and posed in the attitude of a famous movie star, looking similar to extraterrestrials that study our behavior whilst at the same time mocking us.

In this phase of his work he is young, just graduated at the Fine Art Academy and, already, he is searching for his place in the world where he can express his ideas and show a determination that somewhere in the future will always be his distinctive outlook. Then, after the sectioning of their skin and muscles, the faces of his characters become as happy and plump as the ones to be found in typical Chinese New Year posters. These augural posters emerge in the 16th century as a popular artistic form; their gaudy colors depict historical, legendary, folkloristic and daily scenes. This form of art developed further in the following centuries, reaching its zenith under the Qing dynasty and subsequently becoming aligned to advertising and political propaganda posters. Maoist ideology becomes “pop” and, through Feng Zhengjie’s interpretation, the figures gain something of the kitsch and grotesque. Little seems enough to make these people smile; the illusion of a “romantic trip” is frozen by a photographic shot in a plastic and fake pose. Times change, historical phases go on and, with a critical look, Feng Zhengjie follows their evolution.

Find more About Feng Zhengjie paintings end Exhibitions at Saatchi-Gallery

http://www. saatchi-gallery. co. uk/artists/feng_zhengjie. htm

Isa Genzken EDUCATION:

1993-1997

• Düsseldorf Art Academy

1993-1975

• Studied Art History and Philosophy at the University of Cologne

1971-1973

• Berlin University of Fine Arts

1969-1971

• Hamburg College of Fine Arts

SOLO EXHIBITIONS

2005

• Der Spiegel 1989-1991: Isa Genzken, The Photographers Gallery, London, UK

• Kinder filmen, Galerie Daniel Buchholz, Cologne, Germany

New Work, David Zwirner, New York, NY

2004

• Wasserspeier and Angels, Hauser & Wirth, London, UK

• China Art Objects, Los Angeles, CA

• International Art Prize, Cultural Donation of SSK Munich, Munich, Germany

2003

• Isa Genzken, Kunsthalle Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland [catalogue]

• Empire Vampire Teil II, Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus Kunstbau, Munich, Germany

• The Wrong Gallery, New York, NY

2002

• Haare wachsen, wie sie wollen, Skulpturenprojekt Galerie Meerrettich (Josef Strau), Berlin, Germany

• Museum Abeiberg Mönchengladbach [catalogue]

• Wolfgang-Hahn-Preis, Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany

2001

• Galerie Daniel Buchholz, Cologne, Germany

• Magnani, London, UK

• Science Fiction/Heir und jetzt zufrieden sein, AC-Saal (with Wolfgang Tillmans),

• Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany [catalogue]

Conclusions:

Isa Genzken has been making a name for herself with an oeuvre including sculpture, photography, film, video, works on paper and canvas, collages and books.

What to Do Next. . .

If you want any information about Isa Genzken or looking for his paintings please visit us on http://www. saatchi-gallery. co. uk/artists/isa_genzken. htm

selected GROUP EXHIBITIONS

2005

Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles

MCA, Chicago

2004

Wohnseifer / Hein, Union Projects, London

Moving Parts, Kunsthalle Graz / Museum Jean Tinguely Basel

Performative Installation, Siemens 2004, Galerie für zeitgenössische Kunst, Leipzig

A Secret History of Clay: From Gauguin to Gormley, Tate Liverpool

Gegen den Strich, Kunsthalle Baden-Baden

Quicksand, De Appel, Amsterdam

What did you expect?, Galerie Jan Mot, Brussels

2003

Hein, Schellberg, Wohnseifer, Schnittraum, Köln

The straight or crooked way, Royal Collage of Art, London

Biennial of Ceramic in Contemporary Art, Albisola

Auf eigene Gefahr, Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt

Performative Installation, Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst, Leipzig

2002

Ingrepp, Uppsala Kunstmuseum, Uppsala

I promise it`s political, Museum Ludwig, Köln

Fuzzy, Galleria Minini, Brescia

Inside / Outside, Galerie für zeitgenössische Kunst, Leipzig

Hell, neugerriemschneider, Berlin

No Return. Positions from the Collection Haubrok, Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach

2001

Changes possible, Kiel

Biennale di Venezia

Arbeit, Essen, Angst, Kokerei Zollverein, Essen

Frankfurter Positionen 2001, Frankfurt

Strategies against Architecture II, Pisa

Neue Welt, Frankfurter Kunstverein

Take off, Arhus Kunstmuseum

In some of his pieces he articulates a dialogue between the work itself, the person encountering it and the gallery space in which it is sited – though this is a conversation for which one is wholly unprepared. Works of this kind imply a wry relationship both to the Minimalist sculpture of the 1960s and to those forms of institutional critique that sought to question the authority of the museum or gallery space. Yet Hein’s practice does not really fit either tradition – the mode of address and playful tone is at odds with, for example, phenomenological interpretations of Minimalist sculpture, in which the viewer participated in the work but as a relatively abstract presence.

The other wall shows what I chose to create in the end. With this exhibition I’ve been thinking about the gallery’s situation, and how it presents and represents art. How artists can go into an exhibition space and use it to stage their art. My job has been to find out how I, with the room as frame, can make my work function best, while maintaining a relationship with the room itself.

what to Do Next. . .

Read more Articles about Jeppe Hein http://www. saatchi-gallery. co. uk/artists/jeppe_hein. htm