New Neurotic Realism & Charles Saatchi (1999)

Art Design Publicity 3(2) - Totally Walker | Published 14 August 2011
Page 2 of 9

But what was neurotic about New Neurotic Realism? From the book’s illustrations, the only rational answer seemed to be the anxious facial expression of Charlotte, a woman portrayed by Victoria Chalmers, the disturbed children depicted by Nicky Hoberman, and the creepy column of dead rats built by David Falconer. But these had nothing in common with Mark Hoskings’s parodies of Caro’s metal sculptures or Peter Davies’s cheerful, art-world league-tables and text paintings, or lan Dawson’s sculptures made from piles of everyday plastic products that had been partly melted with a blowtorch (the result was a kind of abstract-expressionist sculpture). Arguably, some of the artists were neurotic in the sense of being “obsessive” in their detail and creative procedures.

What, then, was realist about New Neurotic Realism? A number of artists did produce mimetic images and figures— Ron Mueck for instance— while others were realist in the sense that they depicted certain facets of daily life in the 1990s such as domestic leisure, office work, pornography and tower blocks. Many [artists in] New Neurotic Realism took it for granted that today’s reality is as much the artificial or virtual worlds of images and the mass media as it is nature. Simulation was a recurrent characteristic: Tom Hunter used a camera, an actress, a baby and staged-photography to produce a variant of a Vermeer showing a pregnant woman reading a letter (he gave this beautiful photo a critical edge by titling it Woman reading a possession order). Paul Smith also employed a camera to imitate common photographic genres while Brian Cyril Griffiths copied [the appearance of industrial objects] in different, everyday materials.

Tom Hunter and Martin Maloney referenced famous masters from the history of art. According to Dick Price, Maloney transcribed “Poussin through rave culture”; however, such intertexuality seemed perfunctory. In the cases of Katia [Liebmann] and Dexter Dalwood, the sources of inspiration were the mass media. [Liebmann] devised photos employing the comic and movie hero Batman (transmuted into Batgirl), while Dalwood painted famous real and fictional interiors found in novels and television adverts and series: Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Laboratoire Gamier, etc. Dalwood had not seen any of these interiors, only imagined them, though collages of images cut from glossy magazines had been used as starting points.

Perhaps the most accomplished and painterly painter in the New Neurotic Realism camp was Cecily Brown (b. London 1969, trained at Epsom and the Slade). She derived her iconography from pornography but buried it under hectic brushwork indebted to Willem de Kooning. In 1994 Brown moved to New York because painting was more respected there than in London. Her first solo exhibition held in New York in 1997 was a sell-out and she also penned a self-promotional article in Flash Art about the latest “revival of painting”.[3]

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