2020 has been a year of many new things in London’s art world. It has now been announced that Saatchi Yates, a new, 10,000-square-foot commercial gallery founded by Phoebe Saatchi Yates and Arthur Yates, will open in the heart of Mayfair on 15th October. 6,000 square feet of this space is set to be dedicated exclusively to new talent.
It will be the first gallery of this scale in Mayfair that is dedicated to working with unknown, unseen artists. Arthur Yates has emphasised the importance of giving emerging artists full-scale exhibitions, rather than just featuring individual works in group exhibitions, stating that “the idea of giving them full-scale presentations was really important; young artists don’t usually get the opportunity to do shows like this.”
The gallery’s co-founders share an extensive network of collector and dealer relationships, and have been in preparation for this launch for three years. Spread across two floors, Saatchi Yates will be located on Cork Street, an area dubbed the spiritual home of the modern and contemporary art market in London.
SAATCHI YATES Gallery - Courtesy of Cork Street Galleries. Photo Andrea Rossetti.
The opening of this gallery sees co-founder Phoebe Saatchi Yates follow in the footsteps of her father, legendary art collector Charles Saatchi. Both Phoebe and her husband, Arthur Yates, have worked in the past as advisors to her father. While Saatchi initially made his fortune in advertising, his main claim to fame was his success in bringing the Young British Artists (YBAs) - including Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst - to prominence in the 1990s.
Working alongside Charles Saatchi as an advisor, Saatchi Yates and Yates have developed a gallery model they hope will take the commercial art world in an exciting new direction. The lower floor of the new Saatchi Yates gallery will be dedicated to the presentation of blue-chip contemporary art drawn from leading private collections, while large-scale exhibitions on the ground floor gallery space will be dedicated to new and emerging artists.
Works by Yayoi Kusama, Robert Motherwell and Anselm Kiefer are said to feature in the private collection section of the gallery. Saatchi Yates has said that the couple wants to “maintain the Saatchi narrative of showing and buying artists young” but to differentiate their gallery from her father’s collection by staying with these artists “for the long haul and nurture their careers”.
A selection of young dealers hailing from Pace, Hauser & Wirth and Timothy Taylor make up the gallery’s senior team, with additional hires to be announced next month. 19 new paintings by Swiss artist Pascal Sender, who studied at the Düsseldorf Academy under Scottish artist Peter Doig, will make up the opening show. Each picture will be available for purchase at upwards of £50,000.
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