Inspiration to young artists

How do you react to the news that Kay Hartenstein Saatchi, ex-wife of Charles, the woman who helped to discover (or invent) the original Brit Art brat pack, is putting on a exhibition of London’s best young artists this week? Perhaps your eyes have already begun to widen with excitement? Perhaps you feel a sudden predatory stillness, as I did, as greed, the 21st-century’s answer to aesthetic appreciation, steals across your soul?

Well, then, if you’d visited the One One One gallery in London’s West End last Friday as the show, Anticipation, was being hung, you might have felt, as I did, a little chastened by the almost alarming absence of commercialism.

Kay Saatchi may know her Kippenbergers from her Oehlens but she’s less art shark than art aunt, fussing and clucking around her 26 young charges with her co-curators, Catriona Warren, (editorial director of ArtReview) and Flora Fairbairn (one of the UK’s best freelance art dealers).

‘Now, Tatsuya,’ Kay was saying to a young Japanese sculptor, as I arrived, ‘when I last saw your sock sculptures they were on a rug. Where’s the rug?’

Tatsuya looked at his two little crumpled socks beautifully carved from white marble. ‘I forgot it.’

‘Well how are you going to display them? Would you like a rug?’

‘Yes please.’

‘Okaaay, then. I guess I’m going to Woolworths this afternoon!’ Kay laughed and patted his shoulder, then turned to greet me.

Kay Hartenstein Saatchi is smaller, rounder, sweeter-looking than you’d expect and shyer than you’d imagine a woman who posed in a French maid’s outfit for Tatler to be. ‘Catriona!’ she hissed to her friend in a panic as she showed me around the One One One. ‘Come here and help me, in case I don’t know what to say.’