Since 1985, the gallery has been a platform for Britain’s most prominent and influential art collector, Charles Saatchi, to exhibit and promote works from his own collection. It was run as a commercial enterprise until last month. But Saatchi now appears to be relinquishing control of the institution, which has recently changed tack to display more art from outside his own holdings.
Last month, a new enterprise, also called the Saatchi Gallery, was registered as a charitable incorporated organization with the British government’s Charity Commission. Johan Eliasch, 57, a London-based Swedish billionaire who in the late 1990s turned around the fortunes of the ailing sports group Head N.V., was named as the lead trustee. Eliasch is a friend of Saatchi’s and a prominent environmental campaigner. He declined to comment.
Introduced by the British government in 2013, charitable incorporated organizations are meant to combine the benefits of being a nonprofit with those of being a company. The status gives a variety of tax reliefs and trustees “have limited or no liability for a charitable company’s debts,” according to the government’s website.
In recent years, the gallery’s finances have been controlled by one of Saatchi’s private companies.
Philippa Adams, the gallery’s director, said in an email that its operations “are continuing as before under the recently formed charity structure.” She added that the new charity was “debt free” and that all the gallery’s staff members had been transferred to it.
Saatchi, 75, is a former British advertising mogul who became one of the contemporary art world’s most influential and astute collectors and dealers. A 1997 exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, “Sensation: Young British Artists From the Saatchi Collection,” showcased a provocative new spirit in British art. Signature acquisitions, such as Damien Hirst’s 1991 shark-in-formaldehyde sculpture, “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living,” and Tracey Emin’s 1998 installation, “My Bed,” were later sold for millions.
The Saatchi Gallery, which for the past 10 years has leased the stately Duke of York’s Headquarters building in the Chelsea district of London, has concentrated on showing new works by emerging artists from Saatchi’s collection “to the widest audience possible,” according to the gallery’s website. Free admission to the gallery’s own shows encouraged high attendance figures. Just more than 1.8 million visited the museum in 2017, but last year that figure declined by a third to 1.2 million, according to annual reports of museum attendances published by The Art Newspaper.
Guest exhibitions with ticket sales and renting out the venue for events have become the gallery’s main sources of revenue. Some critics have said that commercial exhibitions, such as a two-day pop-up “immersive experience” in 2017 to celebrate 10 years of the reality TV show “Keeping Up With the Kardashians,” or the coming “Tutankhamen: Treasures of the Golden Pharaoh” blockbuster, a global touring show produced by the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities and the IMG Group (where Eliasch has been a director), have blunted the gallery’s cutting-edge brand.
“The astonishment of the early Saatchi has now been normalized,” said Stephen Bayley, a cultural commentator and former director of the privately owned Design Museum in London. “The artists he showcased who caused outrage 30-plus years ago have become media-friendly house-trained pop celebrities,” he added. “And the Saatchi Gallery is on its way to becoming an event venue.”
Accounts submitted to Companies House, Britain’s national business registry, by Marchill Investments, the entity Saatchi has used to run the gallery, show that in 2017 the company had a loss of 24,764 pounds ($32,600), compared with a profit of 1.2 million pounds in 2016. Corporate sponsorship in 2017 was down 37 percent year-on-year to 2.2 million pounds. Marchill Investments’ accounts for 2018 were overdue, according to the Companies House website.
Saatchi, who declined to comment for this article, announced in 2010 that he wished to donate his collection (then valued at $37 million) to the nation on his retirement. This proposed gift has never been formally accepted by the British government and Saatchi has yet to formally announce that he is stepping back from public life.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.