A Daring 40th-Anniversary Exhibition Redefines Contemporary Art

Marking forty years since the Saatchi Gallery first transformed the cultural landscape of London and put contemporary art on the global map, The Long Now exhibition is both a tribute and a provocation: an invitation to look backward while simultaneously confronting the future. For me, the experience feels personal. Earlier in my career, while working at M&C Saatchi, I regularly attended private views at Charles Saatchi’s original Boundary Road gallery. It was there I first encountered Richard Wilson’s legendary oil installation, an unforgettable encounter that shaped my early obsession with contemporary art.

Years before that, as an art foundation student visiting London for the notorious Sensation exhibition at the Royal Academy, I witnessed the rise of the YBAs and the disruptive energy Saatchi had helped ignite. Walking into The Long Now–brilliantly curated by former Saatchi Gallery director Philippa Adams–felt like stepping through a portal linking those formative experiences to the present. Nostalgia and anticipation collide in an exhibition that asks us to slow down, look hard, and think long-term.

A Concept Rooted in Long-Term Thinking

The title The Long Now references a conceptual framework dedicated to long-termism: resisting throwaway culture, resisting the dopamine hit of immediacy, resisting art that chases trends rather than outlasting them. In this spirit, Adams brings together historical Saatchi Gallery favourites with new works from emerging artists, creating dialogues across generations. Some works hold vast cultural memory; others are fresh, exploratory, and visceral. The harmony between past and present is a defining strength of the exhibition, reflecting Saatchi Gallery’s ongoing commitment to truly contemporary art and the monumental scale required to show it.

Adams’s curatorial strategy is emphatically “less is more.” Instead of crowding the expansive rooms, she places bold, high-impact works in ways that give them space to breathe and resonate. The effect is powerful, and often overwhelming.

A Startling Opening: Gesture, Process, and Experimentation

The exhibition begins with an emphasis on materiality and gesture. Works by Alice Anderson, Rannva Kunoy and Carolina Mazzolari introduce themes of process, touch, and the body in space. Their pieces establish an experimental tone sustained throughout the show. From here, the exhibition opens into a dynamic mix of artists–Tim Noble, André Butzer, Dan Colen, Jake Chapman, and Polly Morgan–all of whom stretch the limits of their chosen medium.

This early sequence grounds the exhibition in the messy, uncertain, and exhilarating business of making art. It sets the stage for the shockwaves to come.

Richard Wilson’s 20:50: A Masterpiece Reborn

The show’s gravitational centre is undoubtedly Richard Wilson’s monumental installation 20:50, recreated once again with unwavering precision. First presented at Matt’s Gallery in 1987 before becoming synonymous with Saatchi Gallery where it was exhibited several times, Wilson’s work fills an entire room with recycled engine oil, creating a disorienting mirror that challenges perception itself.

Encountering 20:50 in 2025 feels startlingly urgent. The pitch-black petroleum surface–once a formal experiment in space and illusion–now resonates with new ecological meaning. In an era defined by the climate crisis, its reflective void becomes a meditation on extraction, collapse, and our precarious future. Few artworks maintain relevance across four decades; Wilson’s feels almost prophetic.

High Impact: Shawcross, Kaprow, and the Art of Immersion

Almost as breathtaking as Wilson’s 20:50 is the brilliant pairing of Conrad Shawcross’s suspended car sculpture with Allan Kaprow’s interactive installation YARD. Originally commissioned for the Saatchi group show Sweet Harmony: Rave Today (also curated by Adams), Shawcross’s kinetic sculpture Golden Lotus (Inverted) dangles above viewers, rotating gracefully yet unnervingly. Beneath it lies Kaprow’s mound of tyres, an installation visitors may clamber across in a playful interaction with art.

Together, they form a thrilling dialogue between precarity and play, technology and physicality. It’s a perfect example of Adams’s curatorial talent for building conversations between works that might otherwise seem worlds apart.

Technology, Reality, and the Digital Threshold

The exhibition’s engagement with technology feels particularly timely. Chino Moya, Mat Collishaw and Tom Hunteraddress automation, surveillance, and the unsettling blur between human and machine. Their works confront the digital architectures shaping our lives, often invisibly, always relentlessly.

This theme crescendos in Gavin Turk’s labyrinthine installation Bardo, a mirrored cube that destabilises perception and orientation. Enter at your own risk: I did, and promptly lost my bearings. Bardo becomes an apt metaphor for navigating a world where the boundaries between permanence and collapse, truth and illusion, reality and virtuality have become dangerously thin.

Adams places Turk’s work strategically between Collishaw’s AI-driven dystopian Atlantis and Moya’s AI film installation, creating one of the exhibition’s most compelling curatorial sequences. The three works echo and amplify one another, forming a meditation on the increasingly indistinguishable divide between the digital and physical worlds.

Light, Reflection, and the Meditative Image

A welcome shift in tone arrives in Chris Levine’s serene installation LOVE / NOW, a meditative room of lasers and shifting pink forms. Known widely for his iconic portrait of the late Queen Elizabeth II, Levine brings a spiritual stillness to the exhibition. His immersive light installation invites slowness: the very essence of The Long Now.

Adjacent to Levine’s room is an optical illusion lenticular work by Olafur Eliasson’s, which offers a playful counterpoint, using refracted light to present fractured views of oneself. Together, these works deepen the exhibition’s exploration of perception, presence, and the shifting state of the contemporary gaze.

Painting Reasserts Its Power

Despite the abundance of installation and video work, painting holds its own. Jenny Saville’s monumental canvas Passage (2004) is a knockout: its depiction of gender ambiguity feels as urgent now as it did twenty years ago. Exhibited here for the first time, it stands as a ferocious counterweight to the surrounding installations, reinforcing Saville’s goal to “be a painter of modern life, and modern bodies.”

Nearby, Tim Noble’s playful bas-relief plaster works echo Hieronymus Bosch through a contemporary lens, presenting hybrid human-creature characters with irreverent gusto. Noble’s series of four plaster drawings have never been shown in the UK before, and he told me they are the first works he created as a solo artist. A stylistic departure from his earlier career works as one half of Noble and Webster, his new works are a subversive microcosm of bodily distortion and humour.

Elsewhere, paintings by Alex Katz, Michael Raedecker, Ansel Krut, Martine Poppe, Jo Dennis, and emerging voices such as Henry Hudson broaden the exhibition’s visual language. A highlight is Stone Roses musician John Squire’s fragmented portrait of a woman wearing a bright red sweater, whose wide eyes resemble 60’s model Twiggy, could be a metaphor for filtered social media images of beauty.

In a room dedicated to painting, Martine Poppe’s ethereal landscape stands out. She described to me her desire to capture a remote Norwegian terrain her family has visited for generations, calling it The Long Now as a tribute to landscapes that endure, for now, despite the looming threat of climate change.

Hudson’s vast experimental canvas, rich in unconventional materials, echoes this environmental anxiety with a more visceral edge. Maria Kreyn, meanwhile, pushes landscape into the cosmological, exhibiting a painting that feel suspended between worlds.

Environmental Reckonings

The exhibition’s environmental thread runs deeper through works by Edward Burtynsky, Steven Parrino, Peter Buggenhout, Ibrahim Mahama, Ximena Garrido Lecca and Christopher Le Brun, all addressing themes of extraction, waste, decay and renewal. These works punctuate the show with reminders of our finite world, a fitting counterpoint to the exhibition’s long-term philosophical framework.

A Curatorial Triumph in Spirit and Legacy

Curator Philippa Adams says: “At its heart, The Long Now reaffirms the Gallery’s role as a platform for artists to challenge conventions and shape conversations that extend beyond the walls. It is both a celebration and a provocation, a reminder that art has always been a mirror of its time but also anticipates and interprets the future.”

This ethos has defined Saatchi Gallery since its beginnings. Although Charles Saatchi is no longer involved in the gallery, the anniversary exhibition channels his early instinct for boldness, his eye for rising stars, and his hunger for the new. The result is a show that feels fearless, generous, and most importantly, alive.

The Long Now is not just an anniversary; it is a testament to contemporary art’s enduring power to unsettle, inspire and illuminate. It asks us to step outside the immediacy of the present moment and consider the vast arc of time: past, future, and the fragile window of now through which we understand both.

The Long Now runs at Saatchi Gallery, London until 1st March 2026. Visit here for more information.