The Long Now: Saatchi Gallery Marks Four Decades by Looking Squarely at the Present

Saatchi Gallery’s fortieth year is being observed not with a retrospective but with The Long Now, a group exhibition that treats the institution’s history as an active platform for new work and renewed encounters with landmark pieces. Supported by De Beers London and curated by former Senior Director Philippa Adams, the exhibition spans two floors and nine galleries, combining special commissions with installations, painting, sculpture, and moving-image works. The stated aim is straightforward: to reaffirm the gallery’s role as a space where artists test materials, ideas, and publics—without turning the anniversary into a victory lap.

At the center of The Long Now is a preoccupation with process—how marks are made, how materials resist or enable, and how images come into being. Works by Alice Anderson, Rannva Kunoy, and Carolina Mazzolari set the tone. Each approaches facture as subject: Anderson’s labor-intensive wrapping and weaving, Kunoy’s atmospheric surfaces that catch and shed light, and Mazzolari’s textile-led compositions that blur drawing, painting, and sculpture. The effect is less about style than about showing the work of making, where the hand remains visible and the outcome is a record of attention over time.

A second thread follows artists who push at the edges of medium and message. Tim Noble, André Butzer, Dan Colen, Jake Chapman, and Polly Morgan appear as nodes in a longer conversation about experimentation. Rather than staging greatest-hits tableaux, the exhibition places these works as testing grounds for how meaning is constructed—through juxtaposition, through scale, through conceptual gambits that implicate audience expectations. Their presence underscores a consistent Saatchi tendency: to put risk on display and let the argument unfold in the galleries.

Painting, long a through-line of the gallery’s program, is represented with breadth and technical contrast. Jenny Saville’s Passage (2004) offers a concentrated study of the contemporary body—unidealized, complex, insistently present—reminding viewers why her work has anchored debates around figurative painting over the past quarter-century. Nearby, Alex Katz’s planar precision, Michael Raedecker’s stitched and painted surfaces, Ansel Krut’s off-kilter figuration, Martine Poppe’s ethereal veils, and Jo Dennis’s hybridized approaches present a spectrum of strategies. The grouping makes a plain point: painting is not a single discourse but a set of overlapping languages, continually revised.

Two installations provide the show’s clearest arguments about participation and transformation. Allan Kaprow’s YARD, a field of car tires historically activated by visitors’ movement, recasts sculpture as environment—a place to navigate rather than an object to behold at distance. Overhead, Conrad Shawcross’s Golden Lotus (Inverted) suspends a vintage Lotus car as kinetic sculpture, previously shown in the gallery’s Sweet Harmony: Rave Today exhibition. Read together, the works propose complementary models of agency. Kaprow invites audience intervention; Shawcross retools a piece of industrial design into an object for slow looking, suggesting that technological forms can be stripped of function and reassigned to reflection.

The show also acknowledges the present’s most contested terrains—surveillance, automation, and the ethical pressure points of artificial intelligence. Works by Chino Moya and Mat Collishaw examine how images are produced, sorted, and circulated by machines, prompting a basic question: what does it mean to delegate seeing to systems? Rather than offering didactic answers, the works foreground the apparatus itself—image capture, pattern recognition, distribution—and the way those processes alter how people understand the world and one another.

Environmental strain and material afterlives emerge as another recurring motif. Gavin Turk’s Bardo, presented in fragmented glass panels, reads as a meditation on transition and impermanence—stable enough to hold an image, unstable enough to suggest fracture. Light-based pieces by Olafur Eliasson, Chris Levine, and Frankie Boyle slow perception to a crawl, inviting viewers to register incremental shifts that usually pass unnoticed. Meanwhile, contributions by Edward Burtynsky, Steven Parrino, Peter Buggenhout, Ibrahim Mahama, Ximena Garrido-Lecca, and Christopher Le Brun address extraction, residue, and renewal from different angles and with markedly different materials. The curatorial through-line is pragmatic: climate and industry are not “topics” to be illustrated but conditions under which art is now made and seen.

Richard Wilson’s 20:50 functions as both a historical anchor and an experiential crescendo. The installation fills a room to waist height with recycled engine oil, its mirror-still surface reflecting architecture with disorienting precision. A narrow walkway carries viewers into a chamber where orientation is scrambled and edges dissolve; sightlines seem to extend into a second, inverted space. Previously installed at each of Saatchi Gallery’s three locations, the work reappears here in a new setting on an upper floor, altering the encounter while preserving its core effect. In this context, the material—oil—gains an added charge, but the work resists easy sloganeering. It is a lesson in looking: enter carefully, register the instability, and notice how perception reshapes what appears to be solid.

If anniversary exhibitions often default to institutional self-portraiture, The Long Now keeps the institution in the background and the artwork in the foreground. Adams’s curatorial scaffolding is clear but light, giving space for the installations to carry the argument. The gallery’s current status as a registered charity is noted in practical terms—ticket income is reinvested in programming and access initiatives—while support from De Beers London is presented as sponsorship aligned with a commitment to creativity and innovation rather than as a curatorial determinant.

The artist roster emphasizes intergenerational dialogue and range. Alongside those already mentioned, the exhibition features Olivia Bax, John Currin, Zhivago Duncan, Rafael Gómezbarros, Damien Hirst, Tom Hunter, Henry Hudson, Maria Kreyn, Jeff McMillan, Misha Milovanovich, Ryan Mosley, Alejandro Ospina, Sterling Ruby, Soheila Sokhanvari, John Squire, Dima Srouji, and Alexi Williams Wynn, among others. It is not a canon-building list so much as a cross-section of practices committed to probing how images accrue meaning and value in public space.

Programming and access are built into the exhibition’s frame. Saatchi Gallery Lates extend viewing hours and offer additional entry points for audiences who might otherwise miss the show. Tickets start at £10, with revenues directed back into the organization’s core activities. On the ground floor, a companion presentation organized with the Bagri Foundation—Myths, Dreams and New Realities—spotlights 13 emerging Asian artists, curated by Chelsea Pettitt in collaboration with the Saatchi team. Rather than operate as a satellite, the project runs alongside the main exhibition’s concerns: identity as a dynamic construct, materials as carriers of memory, and narrative as a tool for reimagining the present.

Taken together, The Long Now uses an anniversary not to codify the past but to clarify the present tense of art-making: process foregrounded, participation invited, systems examined, materials tested. The exhibition’s title reads as both description and instruction. Duration matters—not to defer urgency, but to hold attention steady enough for complex work to register. In that sense, the show offers a simple proposition. If a gallery’s value lies in the quality of encounters it makes possible, then the task at forty is the same as at four: bring together objects that demand time, arrange them so they speak across methods and generations, and trust viewers to complete the circuit.

Dates: The Long Now runs November 5, 2025–March 1, 2026. Saatchi Gallery Lates are scheduled for November 7, November 21, December 5, and January 23. The Bagri Foundation’s Myths, Dreams and New Realities is on view October 24–November 30. Tickets start at £10.