The show, called "The Triumph of Painting: Part 2," features works by five up-and-coming German painters and covers topics as diverse as globalization and natural disasters.

It is being hailed as a change in direction for a collector best known for championing the antics of the "young British artists" like Damien Hirst, who exhibited a shark in formaldehyde, and Tracey Emin, who rose to fame by showing an unmade bed.

While the works currently on display in Saatchi’s central London gallery may fall short on shock tactics, they have won praise from newspapers including Britain’s Daily Telegraph for producing moments of "palpable excitement."

One of the painters who has made a big splash at the show is Dirk Skreber, who lives and works in Duesseldorf and New York.

With imagery that recalls the darker works of pop art master Andy Warhol, Skreber’s paintings of natural disasters, car crashes and near-miss train accidents "lovingly embrace catastrophe, offering a religious awe of their grim expectation," according to curators.

In contrast, Berlin-based artist Franz Ackermann offers psychedelic, candy-colored canvases that explore urban generation and globalization, drawing on the artist’s own extensive travels to Asia, the Middle East and South America.

Another Berlin-based artist, Thomas Scheibitz, is showing the same "post-Cubist" work that is currently on display in the German pavilion at the prestigious Venice Biennale.

Albert Oehlen, the oldest painter in the show at age 51, is represented with "enormous, disorderly canvases," wrote the Financial Times, praising how "their tension [is] derived from the pull between representation, deformed images and blotchy abstraction."

Finally, Kai Althoff, a young painter working in Cologne, presents paintings that have been praised for exploring sensuality, violence and morality in the context of Germany’s troubled history.

"The Triumph of Painting: Part 2" is the second instalment in Saatchi’s 20th anniversary exhibition. The first opened in January and featured established painters such as Martin Kippenberger, Peter Doig, Marlene Dumas and Luc Tuymans.

The current show is open at the Saatchi Gallery in London through October 30.
Republished with permission from "The Week in Germany"