Dead: A Celebration of Mortality, Saatchi Gallery, review: Going face to face with the Grim Reaper

While there are some genuinely unsettling aspects of Dead, it's a bit of a hotchpotch
Fetishistic car crashes: Dirk Skreber’s It Rocks Us So Hard Ho Ho Ho 2 (2002)
Dirk Skreber 2002
Ben Luke13 July 2015

Opened to little fanfare, this is an anomaly among Charles Saatchi’s recent exhibitions. It is short-lived, it is thematic rather than being a geographical survey or having a focus on a particular medium, and it draws more than most on works Saatchi has had for a while and not often shown, as well as recent acquisitions.

The occasion is the latest book of the Standard columnist’s essays, which shares the same title but is otherwise unrelated. It is a great topic for a show, of course; death has always been a fun subject for artists. Think of the energy painters have brought to the depiction of the agonies of martyred saints.

The show begins with its best room, a kind of mausoleum for sculpted bodies. Some are genuinely unsettling, such as Andra Ursuta’s Crush, a decayed, blackened figure, covered in spurts of liquid, which look disquietingly like semen. Others, such as the piled up, dismembered corpses among rubbish bags by the Glasgow collective littlewhitehead, are too cartoonish to disturb.

After the first gallery, it’s a bit of a hotchpotch, with works in different media thrown into uncomfortable relationships. Vikenti Nilin’s tense photographs from his Neighbours series are opposite Dirk Skreber’s fetishised paintings of car-crashes.

And the pattern continues, perhaps most ludicrously where Goshka Macuga’s enigmatic sculpture of the levitating occultist Madame Blavatsky is close to the vast, clunky and forlorn Beautiful Superman by David Herbert. While there’s plenty of good stuff in Dead, much of it seems rather haphazardly shoehorned-in.

Until July 26 (020 7811 3070, saatchi-gallery.co.uk)

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