New Sensations/The Future Can Wait

Date
14 October 2011

We were more than made up when Krystina Naylor, one of our 2011 Graduates selection, was chosen for the prestigious New Sensations exhibition organised by The Saatchi Gallery and Channel 4. And a visit to the show yesterday proved that Krystina was in great company in a blockbustingly good show proving this generation of young artists is ready to rule the cultural roost.

This is the fifth time New Sensations and its sister show The Future Can Wait have run alongside Frieze, and the quality on show in the enormous space at Victoria House in Bloomsbury is sensational.

Krystina’s pieces, which play with perspective in retina-bending ways, are predictably excellent and still stand out among such esteemed peers but there’s plenty more to enjoy too.

Ronin Cho’s unnerving moving sculptures are certainly thought-provoking – particulalry the huge electric chair, with two translucent ghostly hands, one of which holds an incredibly detailed Blackberry. Is it a comment on the banalisation of society’s fundamental questions of life and death, or a warning over the authorities’ fear of social media? Maybe neither, maybe both.

Another mixture of the familiar and the uneasy can be seen in Gabriella Boyd’s paintings – the warm pastel shades jar with the disorienting, voyeuristic scenes, and secured her an honourable mention from the judges. She was pipped to the top prize by Royal College of Art graduate Jonny Briggs whose phototgraphs impressively collide the everyday and the supernatural.

Julia Vogl’s magnificent interactive project Disinfect Your Dirty Deeds invites visitors to cleanse themselves of their sins via multi-coloured sanitiser fluid, mocking and presaging a future where morality is dealt with in the same way as any other mundane irritation and Kira Freije’s beautiful, baffling sculptures combine idiosyncratic materials and classical grace to exquisite effect.

Jeremy Hutchison’s Err pulls off the difficult trick of being both genuinely funny and addressing important artistic issues. He wrote to factories around the world requesting an item that had not to work, leaving the particular fault up to the individual worker. The artefacts make a point about perfection and are fantastic fun, while the published emails give an entertaining insight into the process.

And still there’s more – The Future Can Wait includes Adam Dix’s wonderfully low-key paintings which ridicule our deification of technology, Wendy Mayer’s scultpure After Louise ranks as one of the most unsettling things I have ever seen in art gallery (I kept waiting for the old woman to jump out of her ball of wool) and Oleg Toolstoy’s Hands on Knees photograph is an unlikely snapshot of a seemingly thrown-together group of tourists.

I could go on and on but you should really just go yourself if you can – the show is on until Monday with late opening tomorrow.

All images courtesy of The Saatchi Gallery and Charlie Smith London, copyright of the artists.

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About the Author

Rob Alderson

Rob joined It’s Nice That as Online Editor in July 2011 before becoming Editor-in-Chief and working across all editorial projects including itsnicethat.com, Printed Pages, Here and Nicer Tuesdays. Rob left It’s Nice That in June 2015.

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