Art Exhibition

Art Exhibition

The Saatchi Gallery, the Museum of Contemporary Art in London, has a reputation for blockbuster exhibitions in terms of the high attendance figures recorded for recent and previous shows . The gallery's head of development, Rebecca Wilson, considered what the institution aims for and said that "we are not just about appealing to the art world - the people who already know about art. We want to attract lots of people who don't necessarily go to exhibitions ." The Saatchi Gallery's aspirations suggest that there could be an extensive utilisation of publicity behind its shows to develop its potential audiences.

The exhibition “Newspeak: British Art Now Part II” was presented by the Saatchi Gallery on 27th October 2010 to 30th April 2011. The exhibition carried a grand and weighty title; it was expected to experience the momentum and to see the image like Gabriel Orozco's Black Kites, a checkerboard of black squares over a human skull, showing a huge amount of publicity material to produce a lingering impression on the visitors. The visitors were likely to be dominated and attracted by a series of narrative texts throughout the entire display space. Conversely, this seemed not to be the actual scenario according to my own visit. What I experienced was an exhibition which did not even provide wall texts within it. This triggered my interest in what the communication and interpretation strategies developed by the show might have been. This essay will firstly discuss what sorts of graphic material were selected to speak for the show and to reach out to the visitors. Then these graphic materials will be further analysed and critiqued in terms of their production, disposition and form as well as their content. Finally, it will consider whether there are any other strategies that fulfil the exhibition's promises and ambitions.

Philip Taaffe, a great artist born in 1955 in New Jersey (United States of America). Taaffe has shown his quality work all over the world. He was inspired by a number of sources such as Pompeiian mosaics, Islamic architecture, Op Art of 1960s, and 19th century monographs on natural history. In his work he grips beautiful components of painting; in his particular way he utilizes them as quotations or fragments of a “customary actuality” of civic establishments past or present (Wehrenberg, 2000). With the painter's vision, the aforementioned components are fashioned into a recently lit up entire. Taaffe himself ...