The scattergun approach has also long been Charles Saatchi's modus operandi: buy in bulk, on a whim and from largely unrecognised artists and sometimes the results will amount to something. When in 2006 he exhibited part of his hoard of contemporary American art at the old Museum of Mankind site behind the Royal Academy, USA Today was chiefly memorable for two things: the extent of his acquisitions and their qualitative paucity. Now, after shows of modern Chinese and Middle Eastern art, Saatchi has revisited America for the latest exhibition at his grand new gallery in Chelsea. Unfortunately Abstract America: New Painting and Sculpture (until 13 September) is proof that the apple never falls too far from the tree. Although most of the work has been made in the last three years, the quality has not improved.
Many of the pieces are at best unremarkable and at worst execrable (but without having the grace to be interestingly bad). Poor, too, is the title: this is not an exhibition of abstract art, the human body is everywhere. Nor is the title some clever play on words; the organisers present the 32 artists in the show explicitly but unconvincingly as digital-age heirs to the Abstract Expressionists — Pollock, Rothko, Klein et al. The misnomer is just as irritating as many of the works on show.
Too many of the works are lazy and uninspiring and say nothing about modern America. There is a welter of the bored pattern-making, distorted mannequins and resin-drip sculptures that are the stock in trade of second-rate artists. The most overt political comment in the exhibition is Kirsten Stoltmann's Spray Bush, a photograph of a woman spray-painting her pubic hair red. The picture is described as embodying the "ethos of vaginal power and politics" where the artist, "by placing minge up front", transforms her model's sex "into both an audacious beacon and a hazard sign". It is adolescent stuff all round.
There are some redeeming artists however. Peter Coffin's Untitled (Spiral Staircase) is a huge, self-repeating circular construction, the size of an ocean liner's propeller, in which a spiral staircase circles around itself endlessly. Part Escher and part DNA, it is an entertaining visual puzzle that also comments on the repetitions inherent in daily life. Amy Sillman's semi-abstract, organic paintings are full of fragments of half-seen things and are notable less for their borrowings from Philip Guston than for the beauty of their colours. Best of the bunch though is Kristin Baker, with a broader range of subjects than the Futurist-inspired motor racing pictures seen in USA Today. She applies jewel-bright, Perspex colours with a palette knife that overlap like a collage of torn paper. Here there are landscapes, mood pieces and a version of Géricault's Raft of the Medusa, all marked by her technical assurance and eye for composition.
If Saatchi wants to found a Yank Art movement to rival his Brit Art creation, he could do worse than start with Baker and cast his net less wide and with more discrimination.
