The Saatchi Gallery pays tribute to the new art from Germany. Dirk Bell, Andre’ Butzer, ida Ekblad, Isa Genzen, Jeppe Hein, Georg Harold, Stephan Kürten, Jutta Koetter, Josephine Meckseper, Julian Rosefeldt, Gert & Uwe Tobias, Andre Wekua, Alexandra Birken, Zhivago Duncan, Max Frisinger, Felix Gmelin, Thomas Helbig, Volker Hueller, Thomas Kiesewetter, Friedrich Kunath, Kristine Roeptorff, Markus Selg, Corinne Wasmuht, Thomas Zipp. These artists either they are Germans or they work and live in Germany. The selection of these artworks shows the art mood in that part of the world. Although we live in a globalised world connected with the world wide web each single country and town unleash its own identity and character. Life cycle, human loneliness and other allegorical states haunts the figures/sculptures by Markus Seig (Singen, Germany 1974), made out of plaster jute, metal and wood. Born in Stuttgart Germany in 1993, Andre’ Butzer’s mural-like canvases are a compression of painting’s recent history in all its totality, animated by the artist’s trademark anarchic visual codes. Ahnenbild 2411 (2006) is overrun with a roughly executed, psychedelic use of colour and the frantic repetition of a hollow-eyed mask. The repetition of the same anxious faces and overt pleasure in the physical act of painting appears in two Untitled works (both 2007).

A sense of urgency is articulated through their high impasto technique and vivid, almost neon-toned colours. Isa Genzen’s totemic sculptures, colourful-mirrored panels and lacquered paintings articulate the artist’s mysterious method. Harvesting, fusion and re-constructing references from myriad sources, she takes an anything-goes approach to the materials she uses to convey multiple meanings in unexpected ways. Her practice is mostly three-dimensional but if also embraces photography, video, film and collage, the latter finding its way into her sculptures as well as wall-based works, as part of her investigation of the way we create and read images and objects. In Gert and Uwe Tobias’s large scale, carnivalesque panels we see an uncommon merging and subversion of techniques and traditions. The twin brothers, who have worked together since 2001, have created a world of their own out of reviving a diverse range of craft-based arts-wood cuts, lace, embroidery and the national costume of their native Transylvania all appear in their works. Ida Ekblad’s chance-based art practice is a literal reflection of her peripatetic methodology. The production of her sculpture and paintings evolves around “drift” thorough the urban landscape where, like a scavenger, Ekblad collects materials sifting through the discarded remains of contemporary culture. Jutta Koether’s abstract paintings, with their translucent interconnected web pattern, fragments of texts and songs, are like a portrait of the artist in our times. Koether is a painter, but not only that. Interweaving soft, sinuous brushwork and delicate colouring with bold catroon-style figuration and graffiti making is part of a bigger whole - an interdisciplinary artistic practice overlapping performance, music writing and other activities, and reflecting her strong feminist punk/pop-influenced engagement with contemporary theory and culture.

Alexandra Birken’s unmonumental stretcher frame sculptures are informed by her background in fashion design and interest in the radial aspects of handmade culture. A fragmentary array of irregular objects and organic shapes is hung and displayed on strings and aluminium rods. Georg Herold’s stretching, elongated sculptures (2010) made out of roof battens, canvas, lacquer thread and screws, suggest an ambiguous, self-aware state of tension. There is something fetishist about these figures: one looks like it is been dragged along the ground with its hands tied up; the other exaggeratedly bends its back in an overtly sexualised pose. Jeppe Hein (Copenhagen 1974) makes work that can only be experienced through participation. Imbuing technology with an element of surprise and humour, his interactive works playfully remind viewers of their vital part in activating art’s communicative potential.

Thomas Zipp’s installations appropriate the language of museum and scientific display to convey a foreboding view of western civilization’s achievements. Each of Zipp’s charismatic works aims to shed light on the quasi-fictional truths of post enlightenment so-called progress, conveying a sense of the real darkness lurking behind violent acts that are historically constructed as victories. Max Frisinger’s raised glass cases - assemblages crammed with found material - are witty visual paradoxes, governed by a dual sense of cacophony and order. Each side reveals a different topography made up of metal, wood, tubing, table legs, plastic tubs, off cuts and other discharged scraps - all random-looking but perfectly framed around each other and their spatial limitations. Andro Wekua’s photographs and painted sculptural installations channel fragments from his own memories of childhood into mosaic-like narratives, conveying a very real but remote sense of place. In his work, which often features titles (Sunset 2008) is an eight-metre wide installation composed of 170 lazed ceramic panels, it is as if broken images are being put back together, like a seductive but ultimately unsolvable puzzle. Zhivago Duncan (Terre Haute, Indiana, USA, 1980). Through his sprawling, messy multimedia works, Zhivago Duncan comments on the state of contemporary culture and its obsessions, crassly quoted and re-created from an irreversibly apocalyptic point of view. The work shown here was part of a recent exhibition entitled ‘dick Flash’s Souvenirs of Thought in which viewers were taken on a journey into meaning of the senseless remains that might fill a time to come. Kirstine Roepstorff’s mounted collages combine paper, pearls, sequins and paint to create new worlds in which found imagery and associations are re-created, deconstructed and given a glittery agitprop urgency. She collects material in a variety of media and transposes it onto found political advertising Photography through a technique she calls ‘appropriarranging” appropriating and rearranging reality.

Voker Hueller’s large-format collaged canvasses and smaller hand-coloured etchings engulf the viewer in a world where shapes and meaning are fragmented and interconnected to present an eerily abstract sense of portraiture. The symbolic geometry of the face and head is one of Hueller’s central preoccupations. My Portrait In The Year 2080 (2007) is both whimsical and dark with its; combination of filled in and empty spaces. Its squiggly hairs ad wrinkles, blackened teeth and nervous crosshatching. This visual thread is continued in the raw doodling and associative, prism-like compositions of Puppet master.

Stefan Kürter’s architecture-based compositions propose a new Germany growing over abandoned constructs and aspiration of a fading past where memories are broken down and allowed to mutate into dizzying pattern and abstraction - and, notably where man-made structure and nature are seen to coalesce. Thomas Helbig (Rosenheim, Germany 1967) says that his paintings “are about reduction to an unrecognisable state from which something new can then evolve”. Some of his paintings are rooted to teach your-self art manuals, yet instead on focusing on precise copying he leaves the works unfinished, in a state of engagement with abstraction and a sort of larger than life open endendness. His ethereal brushworks and subdued palette oscillate between hiding and unveiling familiar forms. Josephine Meckseper (Stuttgart 1964) makes colleges and installations that reconstruct the world of contemporary advertising and fashion in the context of the Gallery as a way of critiquing the political implications of the iconography of consumer culture. In her displays and photographs we see people and things re-objectified, symbolically removed from their original all too familiar mediated contexts, and rearranged into self consciously mirrored window dressing. Meckseper’s politically engaged works highlight ongoing problems of corporate corruption, status anxiety, social privilege and representation of women. They are also a chilling reminder of the excesses and distortion of capitalism which has created a world in which, she would argue, there is no separation between materialism and political ideology. We are what we buy. Since 1990’s Julian Rosenfeldt has been producing complex film and video installations, as well as photographs, through which we can observe the the formulaic imagery ad content that is generated by contemporary media. Global Soap (2000-2001) was made through sifting a massive collection headshots stills taken from TV soap operas from around the world. The melodramatic expressions of the performance are ordered according to type, than sample and re-edited into grid arrangements that form a kind of iconographic study of emotional codes, half real and half illusionary, of our time.

Friedrich Kunath (Chemnitz, Germany, 1974) uses a wide range of ubiquitous media to explore themes around the existential nature of everyday experience. His drawings, photos, prints and sculptures have an immediate yet quizzical change, raising questions about the obvious. Kunath has the ability imbue approachable, ordinary materials with conceptual heft, always facing his treatment of quotidian pathos with a jester-like humor. Dirk Bell, Munich, 1969) ‘s intimate figurative drawings and paintings unveil a new way of depicting and perceiving sensuality, like an evanescent but still present memory. In works such as “Rabbit’s Moon (2007) and “Wolf Hamlet Madonna Helmex” (2006). The artist revisits traditional genre and compositions - the memento mori still life. The symbolic representation of the human figure - filtering and compressing art historical references with a contemporary sense of dismantlement and disintegration.