Earlier this year, the Saatchi Gallery in London created a groundbreaking all-female art show entitled Champagne Life. We knew it was an event that would interest one of our favourite clients, Private Air Luxury Homes Magazine<\/a>, so we sent along our editor Mandy – notepad, recorder and camera in hand – to get the low down on the event.<\/p>\n

Below is the feature she wrote about the exciting exhibition – as published in the March\/April issue of Private Air.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

CHAMPAGNE LIFE: THE SAATCHI GALLERY\u2019S FIRST ALL-FEMALE SHOW<\/strong><\/p>\n

For the Saatchi Gallery in London, this year is a landmark one: it\u2019s the venue\u2019s 30th anniversary. Birthdays call for celebrations, of course, and the Saatchi Gallery kicked off the festivities with their first-ever all female show, Champagne Life. Fourteen international artists feature in the exhibition, though a quick walk through reveals that gender and occupation are about all that they have in common.<\/p>\n

Just five of the artists are given a full room unto themselves, but even where two or three share a space, the capacious galleries seem to encourage viewers to engage with each artist\u2019s work individually, rather than trying to draw dubious connections between them.<\/p>\n

Only one of the gallery\u2019s enormous white rooms \u2013 that containing Mia Feuer\u2019s papier-m\u00e2ch\u00e9 \u201cJerusalem Donkey,\u201d a wall covered with charred pots and pans courtesy of Saudi artist Maha Malluh and Iranian-born Soheila Sokhanvari\u2019s taxidermy horse, which sits astride a deflated balloon \u2013 has a loosely unifying theme of sorts: all three pieces here point toward the Middle East. <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Sharing another gallery are French sculptor Virgile Ittah\u2019s life-size wax figures, who slump, melting, over the side of iron bed frames. They are overlooked by extraordinarily detailed, gray-scale portraits. Every furrow, shadow and mark of experience on these worn-and-torn faces is impeccably rendered by Serbian painter Jelena Bulajic.<\/p>\n

The show draws its title from one of American artist\u2019s Julia Wachtel\u2019s pop-inspired paintings, which fill the entire first gallery. Here hang a series of grainy, Google-sourced photographic silkscreens of celebrities and violent scenes, all divided into vertical strips and interspersed with colorful cartoon characters. \u201cI\u2019m basically putting myself in the kind of topsy-turvy world of oversaturation and image production, and trying to create a destabilized, nervous emotional position in respect to that space,\u201d Wachtel tells Private Air Luxury Homes.<\/p>\n

This gallery is home to the exhibition\u2019s titular work, \u201cChampagne Life,\u201d a canvas upon which repeated images of Hollywood\u2019s golden couple du jour, Kim Kardashian and Kanye West, are flipped upside down and spliced with paintings of a sky-blue Minnie Mouse figurine. It\u2019s an absurd, provocative coupling and a blunt statement on celebrity and consumer culture. So why Kim? \u201cWith Kim Kardashian, she for me, represents almost pure superficiality and the idea of exteriority,\u201d explains Wachtel. \u201cShe is a M\u00f6bius strip of exteriority: you can never get inside, there is no content. It is only about the surface. And that is the content of the surface. So I thought she\u2019s perfect, because paintings are surfaces. That is what you are dealing with \u2013 pure surface.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The two Minnies on the large \u201cChampagne Life\u201d canvas are hand-painted and therefore, not identical. \u201cRepetition is the logic of the media. But I am not a machine\u2026.\u201d says Wachtel. \u201cI\u2019ve always hand-painted them because I feel like I need to make my own personal investment. It\u2019s like a pilgrimage to the altar of representation that I\u2019m going to invest my time and recreate these images and not just mechanically reproduce them.\u201d<\/p>\n

This article appeared in the March\/April 2016 issue of Private Air Magazine<\/a>. You can read the full article here<\/a>, or the entire issue here<\/a>. For more World Words articles, take a look at our recent projects<\/a> or say hi on Twitter<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u2014<\/p>\n

Art credits: Jerusalem Donkey by Mia Feuer; Julia Wachtel standing in front of her work FLAT; TLYA 13_Tourists \/ TLYA 14_Parrott \/ TLYA 15_La Novice \/ TLYA 16_SR 2014 by Marie Angeletti. All photography by Mandy Hegarty.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Earlier this year, the Saatchi Gallery in London created a groundbreaking all-female art show entitled Champagne Life. We knew it was an event that would interest one of our favourite clients, Private Air Luxury Homes Magazine, so we sent along … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[892],"tags":[1806,1807,149,1808,166,1809,519,1810,1811,531,1812,1813,1814,895,1815,900,995,1078,1207,1262,1301,93,92,23],"yoast_head":"\n