Art collector Charles Saatchi has a gift for Britain. It includes Tracy Emin’s messy bed, Grayson Perry’s explicit pottery and a room full of engine oil.
The advertising tycoon, whose patronage made household names of artists like Emin and Damien Hirst, announced on Thursday he is donating his London gallery and 200 works in its collection to the nation as a new public art museum.
The gallery said the works, valued at more than £25 million (US$37 million), will be given to the government. The 6,500m2 Saatchi Gallery will be renamed the Museum of Contemporary Art, London.
PHOTO: EPA
The artworks being donated include Emin’s My Bed — the artist’s famous recreation of her boudoir, complete with empty liquor bottles, condoms and cigarette butts — and Richard Wilson’s — 20:50, an eye-dazzling room filled with oil. There are also works by Perry — best known for vases adorned with disturbing twists on classical scenes — and artists from around the world, including China’s Zhang Dali (張大力) and India’s Jitish Kallat.
Emin said she was thrilled by Saatchi’s gift.
“I wish more people had that kind of vision,” she said.
Saatchi, co-founder of the Saatchi & Saatchi ad agency, was the main patron of the Young British Artists movement of the 1990s, which made Hirst and Emin millionaires.
He captured the public imagination with his 1997 exhibition Sensation, which included Hirst’s shark pickled in formaldehyde and Emin’s tent appliqued with the names of Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995.”
The show’s impact lived up to its name. When it opened in New York in 1999, then-mayor Rudolph Giuliani was so offended by Chris Ofili’s portrait of the Virgin Mary adorned with elephant dung that he temporarily cut off funding to the Brooklyn Museum.
The exhibition’s success helped make Saatchi one of the art world’s most powerful figures.
“He was part of the perfect storm of British art’s success,” Perry said.
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