Saatch good intentions
Despite what it says on the label, Charles Saatchi's latest gathering of painters - featuring six established names with a distinctly Northern European flavour - certainly doesn't exemplify the most important or influential painters today, or even show what a vital medium it remains.
British artist Peter Doig kicks off this uneven mix. His shimmering, almost mythical paintings of cold climes are quite seductive.
Yet every show the Saatchi Gallery has held since it opened has featured these works prominently, so it seems a bit cheap to charge us to see them once again under a different heading.
Two German ironists, Martin Kippenberger and Jˆrg Immendorff, take up the huge rotunda, as well as several rooms. Kipperberger paints deliberately sloppy canvases, and though the late artist has a bigger reputation, it's Immendorff's 'historical' neoexpressionist paintings that are by far the more interesting. By comparison, Belgian Luc Tuymans barely gets a look in. A handful of badly installed works doesn't convey their malign power.
The Marlene Dumas paintings are wonderful and much better hung. In the Boiler Room, we have four paintings by the resident Dutch artist, each suggestive of furtive and awkward sexuality.
The most pointless inclusion is the so-called 'Pope Of Viennese Aktionism', Hermann Nitsch, who achieved notoriety for his cultish 'offal orgies'. Shown here are his 'splatter paintings', apparently animal blood mixed with the symbolic 'blood' of red paint.
They're quite nice to look at, but can they hardly be said to herald the triumph of the painterly medium.
Despite its grandiose claims, a private collection, as we know, can only reflect one collector's taste.
Until Jun 5, Saatchi Gallery, County Hall, South Bank SE1, daily 10am to 8pm (Fri and Sat to 10pm), £9, £6.75 concs. Tel: 020 7823 2363. Tube: Waterloo/Westminster
