Phoebe Saatchi Yates is the 26-year-old only daughter of the Anglo-Iraqi entrepreneur and major art collector Charles Saatchi, whose Saatchi Gallery in London showcases his internationally renowned art collection. Following in her father’s footsteps, the daughter decided to take the reins of the family business and launch the new Saatchi Yates Gallery in the heart of Mayfair, which will open its doors to the public on October 15th.
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Phoebe Saatchi Yates and her husband, Arthur Yates, have been preparing for the launch of the gallery for the past three years. “My dad’s role has been to completely guide us, as he has with everything in my whole life. He has helped us build the program and he has trained us up on all the elements of what the art world has been before, so we can break all those rules” Saatchi Yates says.
Located in London’s Mayfair, the gallery will showcase emerging artists, to whom the first-floor space will be entirely dedicated. In addition, there will be a viewing room located in the basement where secondary art market works from private collections will be exhibited. This latter section will include works by established artists, such as Robert Motherwell, Anselm Kiefer, and Yayoi Kusama, but the focus of the new gallery will be on emerging talents ready to be launched on the art market. "We wanted to keep the typical Saatchi narrative, of showing and buying young artists," said Phoebe Saatchi, "but the difference is that we want to stay with them also in the long term and grow their careers”.
The exhibition program will not include a vast number of artists, but rather, will concentrate on a selection of them, based on the quality of their artistic practices and careers. The first exhibition to inaugurate the opening of Saatchi Yates Gallery will be a solo show of the young Swiss artist Pascal Sender, who has created nineteen paintings for the upcoming exhibition, priced starting from £50,000 each. Sender was born in Locarno in 1988 and currently lives and works in London. He graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Düsseldorf and followed the practices of his teacher Peter Doig, by proposing an art that mixes landscapes and virtual reality.
Despite the global Covid-19 pandemic and Brexit-related issues, the couple has chosen a strategic location for their London space, described by them as the “golden triangle between Christie’s and Sotheby’s”. " You can’t put your life on hold" affirmed Phoebe Saatchi, "What we’re trying to do with the gallery is start something that’s hopeful and a new way of looking at things. It’s quite nice in a way to be doing something really positive after the strangest year we ever experienced”.