Saatchi Gallery – Contemporary Art Exhibition

Craig’s review… You don’t want to listen to me when it comes to art because I haven’t got an artistic bone in my body (hey, at least I’m honest!) but I do know what minimalism is, and the Saatchi Gallery is a minimalist gallery of modern art. That is how I would describe it, because there’s hardly any art inside. It’s all pine floors and bright white lights illuminating bare white walls – it’s all wall. If you like staring at the wall then you’ll love it.

Gone are the days when you looked at a picture and admired the artist’s skill with a paintbrush because it’s all about the message these days. If the Saatchi Gallery commissioned you to do a piece about global warming then don’t bother painting a rainforest – they would never show anything like that. You’d have better luck placing an ice cube on a tree stump and filming it melt. If you called it something pretentious like The Iceberg’s Final Tears then they’d snap it up.

Considering that this is supposed to be one of London’s leading art galleries you might expect to find a few famous names inside, but if you’re hoping to see some Andy Warhol’s and Piet Mondrian’s then forget it – go to the Tate Modern instead.

The gallery doesn’t have a permanent collection so what I describe to you now will have disappeared by the time you arrive, but don’t worry because that will be a blessing – these aren’t the kind of pieces you’ll want to see twice. Let me describe them to you so you can see what I mean. I’m staring at three big canvases at the moment: three big faces. One face consists of four ripped bits of sellotape. The second face has got a red line for his lips and a crumpled up piece of notepaper for his nose.

The next room just looks like graffiti – the kind of pictures that you find flaking away in the stairwell of an abandoned flat.

The guy next-door to that has totally wrecked a rainbow, mixing up the darkest and dirtiest colours he could find and smeared them in a giant arc across his sheet. There are plenty of things that you can do with a rainbow, wear it as a novelty tie or use it as a ribbon to wrap up some presents, but please not this. He’s sucked all the sunshine out of it and left us with the shrivelled husk.

Worth a visit? ☆☆☆Value for money? freeGood for kids? ☆☆☆Easy to get to? ★★★

I also recommend… If you enjoy this then try Hayward Gallery (catch a tube from Sloane Square to Waterloo) and Tate Modern (take a tube journey from Sloane Square to Southwark)

The author Craig Cross owns city-guide.london and has spent the last decade reviewing the capital’s landmarks, attractions and hotels. His guidebook London Squire is available from Amazon