Most of you may be familiar with the Saatchi Gallery at the Duke of York HQ building in King’s Road, Chelsea, London. What you may not be aware of is that an affiliate of the Gallery, Saatchi Online, is hosting regular ‘Showdowns’.
The Showdown is an online tournament with the websites’ subscribers voting for their favourite work, with the artists scoring most votes moving on to each successive round.
The winners are then invited to exhibit their work at the London Gallery for a one-month period.
In addition, the artist who receives the greatest number of votes along with the runner up are awarded a cash prize, and, more importantly, their artistic activity is posted in the Saatchi Online Magazine.
The selection takes the following formation. The online public is asked to choose its favourite of two randomly picked artworks.
After two weeks of constant voting, in a showdown fashion, entries are shortlisted to the best 128 and they will then compete in a bracket-style tournament – win or go home, each round lasting two days.
The works are in this way reduced to 64, 32 and then 16. From among the thousands in one of these most recent competitions, Patrick Dalli made it to the ‘Top 16’ – out of 4,500 entries.
The ‘Top 16’will be highlighted in the Saatchi Online Magazine in the coming week or two (magazine.saatchionline.com).
This is an important move, since Saatchi Online is a social networking platform for contemporary art where artists (especially young artists or international ones who have never or rarely ever exhibited in the UK) can expose their work to influential collectors, curators, critics and galleries.
Dalli entered Saatchi Online’s Showdown at the insistence of his wife, Helena. Although he didn’t think much of it then, he is extremely satisfied now.
Jillian Kogan Dunn, VP, business development and artist-in-residence, told The Sunday Times that Saatchi Online is “thrilled for Patrick Dalli”.
The ‘Top 16’ are moreover being encouraged to enter in the current Showdown for Scope New York.
Dalli is rightly known as a figurative, contemporary, realist artist, particularly for his large-scale portrait-nudes and portraits. The painting he picked to compete in the Showdown is a monumental painting, his largest to date, of three nudes (his favourite models) sitting on an equal plane, that almost takes the semblance of a triptych. Each of the figures coexist individually, but together they make a comprehensive whole.
Dalli is an artist who is concerned about the temptation for younger artists to be commercial and hide their inabilities. He therefore suggests that everyone “should ‘sweat out’ in formal training”, as it rightly should be in any profession, and he advises them to be sincere with themselves, to undergo a thorough exercise of self-evaluation and to realise what their strengths and weaknesses are.
Dalli’s exposure abroad does not end with Saatchi Online. He will be part of a collective exhibition organised by Jean Jacques van Belle entitled ‘Europa Art Selection – familiar faces’, in Berlin (www.eu-artselection.eu), which will showcase the work of portrait painters from various EU countries.
Dalli’s profile on Saatchi online can be found at http://magazine.saatchionline.com/saatchi-online-news/showdown/saatchi-online-interviews-showdown%e2%80%99s-top-finalists.