Timeline
1985 – 30,000-square-foot (2,800 m2) Saatchi Gallery opens at Boundary Road, London NW8, featuring many key works by Donald Judd, Brice Marden, Cy Twombly and Andy Warhol. This was the first UK exhibition for Twombly and Marden.
1986 – Exhibits Anselm Kiefer and Richard Serra.
1987 – The New York Art Now show introduces American artists including Jeff Koons, Robert Gober, Ashley Bickerton, Carroll Dunham and Phillip Taaffe to the UK.
1988–1991 ¬– Introduces artists including Leon Golub, Phillip Guston, Sigmar Polke, Bruce Nauman, Richard Artschwager and Cindy Sherman to London.
1992 – Curates its first Young British Artists show Damien Hirst, Marc Quinn, Rachel Whiteread, Gavin Turk, Glenn Brown, Sarah Lucas, Jenny Saville and Gary Hume were all presented in these exhibitions.
1997 – Opens Sensation: Young British Art from the Saatchi Gallery at the Royal Academy featuring 42 artists including The Chapman Brothers, Marcus Harvey, Damien Hirst, Ron Mueck, Jenny Saville, Sarah Lucas & Tracey Emin. Sensation attracted over 300,000 visitors, a record for a contemporary exhibition.
1999 – Sensation at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin.
1999 – Sensation tours to Brooklyn Museum of Art.
1999 – Donates 100 artworks to the Arts Council of Great Britain Collection, which operates a ‘lending library’ to museums and galleries around Britain.
2000 – Donates 40 works through the National Arts Collection Fund to eight museums across Britain.
2000 – Begins a series of one person shows of major international figures mostly new to Britain, including Duane Hanson, Boris Mikhailov and Alex Katz. Shows entitled Young Americans and Eurovision introduce artists including John Currin, Andreas Gursky, Charles Ray, Richard Prince, Rineke Dijkstra, Lisa Yuskavage and Elizabeth Peyton.
2001 – I am a Camera exhibition opens at the Gallery, showing photography and other related works where traditional boundaries are blurred as photographs influence paintings, and paintings influence photographs. The show included work by many other artists new in the UK.
2002 – Donates 50 artworks to the Paintings in Hospitals program which lends over 3,000 originals to NHS hospitals, hospices and health centers throughout England, Wales and Ireland.
2003 – Moves to County Hall, the Greater London Council’s former headquarters on the South Bank, creating a 40,000 square feet (3,700 m2) exhibition space. The opening show included a Hirst retrospective as well as works by other YBAs such as the Chapman Brothers, Tracey Emin, Jenny Saville and Sarah Lucas.
2004 – A fire in the Momart storage warehouse destroyed many works from the collection, including the major Tracey Emin work Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–95 ("the tent"), and Jake and Dinos Chapman's tableau Hell.
2005 – Launches a year-long, three-part series exhibition, The Triumph of Painting. The opening exhibition focuses on influential European painters Marlene Dumas, Martin Kippenberger, Luc Tuymans, Peter Doig, Jörg Immendorff, and followed with younger painters including Albert Oehlen, Wilhelm Sasnal and Thomas Scheibitz.
2005 – Expanded into the Duke of York's Headquarters building in Chelsea. This put a halt to London shows while the new premises were being prepared.
2005 – Exhibited a selection of works from The Triumph of Painting in Leeds Art Gallery.
2006 – During the period between premises, the Saatchi Online website began an open-access section where artists could upload works of art and their biographies onto personal pages. The site currently has over 100,000 artist profiles and receives over 68 million hits a day, ranking at 316 in the Alexa Top 50,000 World Websites.
2006 – In association with the Guardian newspaper, opened the first ever reader-curated exhibition, showing the work of 10 artists registered on Saatchi Online. In November launched a new section within Saatchi Online exclusively for art students, called Stuart. Art students from all over the world were able to create home pages with images of their art, photos, lists of their favorite artists, books, films and television shows, and links to their friends' pages. Other sections on Saatchi Online include; chat, a daily art magazine, a forum, written and video blogs, as well as sections for street art, photography and illustration.
2006 – USA Today: New American Art from the Saatchi Gallery opens at the Royal Academy.
2007 – Added a new online feature called "Museums around the World" hosting over 2,800 museums, showing collection highlights, exhibitions and other relevant information. 2,700 Colleges and Universities from around the world also offer their profiles, enabling potential students to examine their prospectuses.
2007 – USA Today: New American Art from the Saatchi Gallery toured to The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg, Russia.
2008 – Reopens on the October 9 in the entire 70,000 square feet (6,500 m2) Duke of York's Headquarters building on Kings Road in Chelsea, London, with The Revolution Continues: New Art from China.
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