40 is the new…Contemporary Art Exhibition

The Long Now: Saatchi Gallery at 40

An extraordinary group exhibition honouring the London Gallery's dedication to contemporary art. It features special commissions, immersive installations, paintings, and sculptures - a sensory feast and occasionally a startling experience. Visit Saatchi Gallery's website for more information.

The Long Now Exhibition from: 05.11.2025 to 01.03.2026 (ticketed)

Located on 1 & 2 floors

Tube: Sloane Square (District & Circle Lines)

Essentials: Typically, there are free exhibitions on the ground floor. Adequate restrooms. No cafe in the Gallery itself but lots of eateries within a short walking distance. Check out Duke of York Square.

Selected Artworks from the Exhibition

By André Butzer (b. 1973, Stuttgart, Germany) lives and works in Berlin.

His work is characterised by a fusion of European Expressionism and American ready-made pop culture. With influences ranging from Paul Cézanne to Walt Disney, Butzer has developed an elaborate fictitious universe. The conceptual repetition and seeming seriality of his iconic characters speak to his continuous enquiry into societal contradictions and social non-conformity.

Frau am Tisch mit Früchten-Matisse presents a single woman's head amidst a vast red interior with dispersed Mediterranean fruits coming in and out of appearance. In this cyclical process of passing and returning, nothing is lost. Everything is accommodated in the complete existence of the image, in which everything that was, is and will be, is present at the same time. In this temporal coherence, even the fruits are cyclically rounded in themselves and embody new beginnings - maturing, rebirth and renewed ripening.

(Text by Saatchi Gallery)

Casa Tomada (House Taken), 2019

Resin, fibreglass, wood, screen-cotton, rope, sand. and Gerreión coal

By Kalael Gomezoaros (born 1972 Santa Marta, Colombia).

The artist addresses the fragilty of the human condition and the history of violence in his native Colombia. Since its conception in 2008, Casa Tomada (House Taken) has been exhibited across the world - first displayed at Saatchi Gallery in Pangaea, (2014). It's title references the 1946 short story by Argentinian author Juio Cortázar, in which a house is gradually taken over, prompting the occupants to flee. Central to the artist's work is migration and forced displacement of human beings, originally made in response to the Colombian Civil War,

Gómezbarros fashioned the ant bodies from casts of human skulls, which are covered with Colombian sand and bound together using strips of cotton from T-shirts, commonty worn by Colombian farm workers. The ant legs are made from the wragrant branches of the Jasmine tree. during the civil war, such branches were used to mask the smell of the bodies victims.

(Text by Saatchi Gallery)

By Martine Poppe (b. 1988, Oslo, Norway).

Martine lives and works between London and Oslo. Her works emerge from the interplay of different materials, negotiating the boundaries between abstraction and representation. Climate is central to her subject matter, and her process often begins with photographs of nature that she digitally manipulates until they verge on becoming illegible. Translating these digital sketches to paintings with quick, regular strokes, Poppe's tactile surfaces capture the fragile and fleeting qualities of diffracted light, overexposure and the pixelation of blown-up digital images. She creates meditative spaces that feel simultaneously personal and universal, engaging both memory and imagination. Her work draws from photographs taken over the past decade, maintaining extensive archives of photographs which she revisits and edits.

(Text by Saatchi Gallery)

By Michael Raedecker (b. 1963, Amsterdam, The Netherlands).

Michael seeks to make sense of the symbiotic and often parasitic relationship between nature and humanity - to understand our place in the world and draw attention to the proximity and power of nature in relation to the urban environment.

Driven by craft and method as much as by imagery, Raedecker blends painting with richly textural embroidery to create his mixed-media works. The compositions he builds hold the urban in an uneasy balance with nature, which creeps and sprawls across the canvas, over open car doors, solitary sun loungers, and vacant pools. His paintings deal with the presence, but visual absence, of us in relation to our environment; the suburban setting where the landscape meets man-made dwellings.

(Text by Saatchi Gallery)

Allan Kaprow's Yard marks a seminal moment in the history of contemporary culture. Advocating the blurring of art and life, in 1961 the American artist filled a New York courtyard with piles of discarded tyres, transforming the space into an artwork (an 'environment') and inviting visitors to climb, shift, and move through the work.

Kaprow re-invented Yard and his other environments multiple times throughout his career until his passing in 2006. Here its 9th version, originally conceived in Italy in 2003 and including tences as architectural elements, is given a new reading in dialogue with monumental works by two important British artists.

Hovering above, Conrad Shawcross's Golden Lotus (Inverted), originally presented at Saatchi Gallery in 2019, rotates and resonates with MYLO's original soundtrack, serving as a vertical counterpoint to the field of tyres below and creating an interplay between its moving shadows and the participating audience.

At the same time, Christopher Le Brun's vast canvas (not in the frame), Tristan, extends the dialogue into the realm of painting. Its dark, immersive surface evokes both landscape and interiority. Acting as a silent yet powerful presence, it further expands the tension between gravity and elevation within this space.

Together these works form a distinctive and powerful meditation on immersion and transformation, generating an entirely new environment to explore the relationship between experience and image. They invite you to be a part of the installation, creating a sensory experience that is less about looking and more about being.

"This spontaneous piece takes a flawed British supercar, conceived against a backdrop of extremely tumultuous economic times, as an iconic symbol of 1980s decadence and literally inverts it - transforming it into a joyful, irreverent act of rebellion against status quos."

- Conrad Shawcross

(Curated by Philippa Adams and Piero Tomassoni. Saatchi Gallery)

By Tom Hunter (b. 1965, Dorset, UK).

Tom is a London-based British artist working in photography and film. Hunter explores themes depicting his local neighbourhood of East London, drawing on art historical references.

Hunter's series Life and Death in Hackney, 1991-2001, creates a melancholic beauty out of the post-industrial decay where the wild buddleia and sub-cultural inhabitants take root and bloom.

The somewhat abandoned areas became epicentres of the new warehouse rave scene of the early 90's. The Way Home takes inspiration from John Millais's Ophelia, showing a young girl whose journey home from one such rave was curtailed by falling into the canal and losing herself to the dark slippery, industrial motorway of a bygone era. Through the influence of Pre-Raphaelite artists and the intertwining of beauty and nature, Hunter has reinvestigated a maligned inner city landscape to create an unusual chronicle of contemporary, urban Britain.

(Text by Saatchi Gallery)

Fun note: Taylor Swift’s The Fate of Ophelia may have also taken inspiration from Millais's Ophelia.

By Ryan Mosley (b. 1980, Chesterfield, UK) .

Ryan is a narrative painter based in Sheffield. Mosley uses pictorial cues - from beards, to brick walls and top hats - as triggers for art historical reference, class commentary, and pure formalism.

The boat has been a recurring motif for Mosley in recent years, itself an evolution of the stage motif that remains a common setting in his paintings. As a mode of transport, it traverses time, rendering this scene in no fixed era or locale. It also enables the marriage of two long running themes in the artist's work; journeying and performance.

Although we might discern from their number that the musicians may be the cargo of this vessel, we cannot conclude their origin, destination or broader identity and so they also sit astride history. Timeless in their garb and melodic practice.

(Text by Saatchi Gallery)

Aren’t the colours reminiscent of a Hockney?

Can you spot the Jenny Savile?

Titled Passage (2004), a work that holds both strength and beauty, and paradigmatically realises the artist’s ambition to “be a painter of modern life, and modern bodies”. (Saville, quoted in Rachel Cooke, The Observer, 9 June 2012).

(Text by Saatchi Gallery)

Born in 1970 in Cambridge, England, Saville attended the Glasgow School of Art from 1988 to 1992, spending a term at the University of Cincinnati in 1991.

In her depictions of the human form, Jenny Saville transcends the boundaries of both classical figuration and modern abstraction.

Richard Wilson's 20:50 returns with renewed force to Saatchi Gallery, presented for the first time on the Gallery's top floor. At first glance, the surface appears mirror-like, turning the room into a vast optical illusion.

Originally created in 1987 and now considered one of Britain's most iconic installations, 20:50 holds up a reflection of ourselves and the world we inhabit. In today's climate crisis, this room, filled with recycled sump oil (the thick black engine oil drained from vehicle engines becomes a meditation on consumption and environmental uncertainty. Its title refers to the grade of the oil itself, but the experience it creates is far from industrial, prompting us to consider the coexistence of material excess and ecological fragility in the reality we live in today.

20:50 gathers the themes of the exhibition into one immersive encounter. The still surface captures a tension between presence and absence, beauty and unease, inviting us to pause within a moment of disorientation and reflection. Like the exhibition as a whole, Wilson's work reminds us that art does not simply record its time but unsettles it, offering new ways of seeing ourselves and our future. It is both an ending and a beginning - a space to reflect on forty years of the Gallery's history while looking ahead to the possibilities that lie beyond.

(Updated November 2025)