Phoebe Saatchi and Arthur Yates open first temporary space in Italy: 'Here's why in Turin'

Saatchi Yates ’ first gallery in Italy opened on Nov. 3: a 500-square-meter temporary space opened at 10 Via Gobetti in Turin, Italy, where until Nov. 19 the works of a great historicized artist, A.R. Penck (Dresden, 1939 - Zurich, 2017), and two emerging ones represented by Saatchi Yates, American-Korean Jin Angdoo (Yeoju, 1981) and Californian Kottie Paloma (Los Angeles, 1974). The opening of the Turin space is part of an extensive program that the very young Phoebe Saatchi Y ates and Arthur Yates are about to launch around the world, and the exhibition in the centrally located space near Porta Nuova station is the first event opened by the pair after a year in which Saatchi and Yates focused on their London gallery.

In fact, the Saatchi Yates project was born in October 2020, when 26-year-old Phoebe Saatchi and her husband Arthur Yates founded their commercial gallery in London with the aim of supporting young artists in a 1,000-square-foot space in the Mayfair district of Cork Street. In the London gallery, directed by a very young Italian, Stefano Amoretti from Genoa, born in 1994 (and he is not the only Italian on the team: Lucrezia Pero from Turin, who is in charge of institutional relations, is also part of it), exhibitions of emerging artists are organized: the ground floor of the gallery is reserved precisely for their projects, with wide-ranging exhibitions, while the lower floor is dedicated to the presentation of contemporary blue chip art on loan from important private collections.

It is a work that took three years of preparation, during which Phoebe Saatchi Yates and Arthur Yates built a network of relationships, among collectors and dealers: working also with Charles Saatchi, Phoebe’s father, as advisor, the couple set out to develop a gallery model to “evolve the commercial art world in a new, exciting direction,” reads the official presentation. “The Saatchi Yates project,” Lucrezia Pero explains, “came about after three years of reflection by Phoebe and Arthur. They wanted to do something in the field of art, because they both grew up in it, but that would be new, young and dynamic. They thought about the various possible formats, and their final idea was to create a gallery where they could bring young (especially from the point of view of their careers), emerging artists to a place where you are not used to seeing them, because when you go to Mayfair you know that you are going to find galleries with well-established, well-known artists. And so they took this very large space where many of these artists were also amazed (many of them had never seen the works from ... so far away), and by doing that, by bringing this kind of experience downtown, they had positive feedback, because many discovered artists and works that were not on their radar at all. And this first year, despite the lockdown, has gone very well.”

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The Saatchi Yates temporary

The Saatchi Yates

Four exhibitions Saatchi Yates has so far hosted in London: solo shows by Swiss Pascal Sender (the show with which the gallery was inaugurated), British artist Benjamin Spiers, and Ethiopian Tesfaye Urgessa, the latter known to the Italian public for his exhibition held in 2019 at Palazzo Pitti, his first Italian experience. In addition, in the spring of 2021, the gallery also welcomed a group show of young French artists, entitled Allez la France!

The Turin gallery thus represents a new challenge for Saatchi Yates. “We’ve been to Turin in the past, we love the history of the city, particularly that related to Arte Povera, and then there is an important and strong base of collectors here,” Arthur Yates explains to Finestre Sull’Arte. “In addition, the decision to open in Turin also stems from the fact that Italian professionals work in our London gallery, starting with Stefano Amoretti, and it is from discussions with them that the idea of opening a space in Italy as well was born, after a year of work in London, in a gallery that moreover was born in the midst of the pandemic. Because of the pandemic we could not travel, and now that it is again possible to do so we did not want to miss the opportunity to discover new destinations and new cities. Again, the people who work in our gallery are largely connected for various reasons to Turin, so we thought it was the ideal place to start from.” Why open a temporary gallery? "The choice to open a temporary space,“ Yates further explains, ”is dictated by the fact that we wanted to see how it would go first. In any case, we really love this city, which has been very welcoming toward us, and we have also received very positive feedback, so we do not exclude staying even longer. Who knows!"

The inaugural exhibition begins on the ground floor of the gallery on Via Gobetti (which has three levels) with works by A.R. Penck, one of the most significant postwar artists in Germany. Born in Dresden in 1939, he helped radically change German painting after World War II along with other great masters such as Anselm Kiefer and Sigmar Polke. Penck is famous for his paintings and sculptures characterized by symbols and forms that hark back to a primitive dimension: his figures and signs recall rock art and tribal art. Works by Penck are held in numerous museums, from the Centre Pompidou in Paris to the Tate Modern in London, from the National Gallery in Washington to MoMA in New York. Penck’s works are flanked by those of Angdoo and Paloma. Jin Angdoo, who works between Paris and Los Angeles, is part of a movement known as “Modern Jazz,” based between Paris and Marseille, and including artists such as Mathieu Julien, Hams Klemens and Kevin Pinsembert. Angdoo has been noted for her abstract works with a minimalist approach: large floating shapes, crosses and circles dominate her canvases, which in their simplicity aspire to become powerful banners that represent something larger than what is seen on the painted surface. Kottie Paloma, a painter currently living in Alzenau, Germany, offers paintings, drawings, artist’s books and sculptures that aim to investigate the dark sides of society in a humorous, biting and raw manner. For him, abstract art is like a bridge between sculpture, photography and painting. His art has already found a place in numerous public and private collections in Europe and the United States (his works can be found, for example, at the MoMA in New York, the State Library in Munich, and the Harvard and Stanford art collections).

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The Saatchi Yates

The Saatchi Yates temporary

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“These are three artists,” Phoebe Saatchi Yates tells us, "who are together in a very organic way. We already worked with Jin Angdoo for the exhibition we opened in March [the aforementioned Allez la France!, ed.]: even then, many of those who visited the show advanced parallels with Penck. Angdoo began his career as a graffiti artist, making his works on the walls of Paris, on the street, and then developed his language in the direction we now see in the gallery, however much his graffiti was also already abstract. She is an artist we really like: we really love her confidence and the fact that she looks so masculine and feminine at the same time. As for Kottie Paloma, she is one of the first artists we discovered when we started the London gallery. We think her art also figures well alongside Penck’s, because Paloma also has this sign expression that brings back to rock art. It is an exhibition with three artists who share similar modes of expression, and it seemed to us to open in Turin with these artists."

“Galleries there are many,” Lucrezia Pero concludes, “and making a name for yourself, as well as being positively received as a young gallery, was very laborious. Having to take the first step outside after a year in which we worked only in London, Turin for us seemed an obvious choice: Stefano Amoretti and I both have connections to Turin, I was born here and lived here for several years, and he has many ties to the city anyway. Knowing Artissima, knowing the history of Turin and Arte Povera, and knowing that it has always been an important art center even in past centuries, we asked ourselves, why not? Instead of opening in Milan, which might seem like an obvious choice, and I say this having lived fifteen years in Milan, Turin seemed more interesting to us, a place where both the history and the art scene seemed very favorable for opening the project. And then this year there is also the coincidence of the ATP finals opening in a few days. So we proposed the project to Phoebe and Arthur and, crazier than us, they followed us in this idea, came here and fell even more in love with the city. Moreover, it is a way for us to get to know each other more, and also for them to get to know Turin and Italy a little better as well. In short, we liked to amaze!”

Phoebe Saatchi and Arthur Yates open first temporary space in Italy: 'Here's why in Turin'

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