Subversive beauty in Unveiled

I can hear you ask: Isn’t Charles Saatchi responsible for hyping the most overblown British artistic talents of the past 20 years? Wasn’t that Chinese show full of the worst pop art clichés? Isn’t a show based on a geographical area a woefully archaic way of curating art in the era of globalisation?

Yes — to all those questions, but London’s great art entrepreneur is back on form with this exhibition of thrillingly topical, often brilliantly executed work by a new generation of Middle Eastern artists.

The artists come from Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, Iran and Iraq. Many of them have spent large amounts of time in the West but the work is still Middle Eastern in its styles and themes. In the first gallery, Lebanese artist Marwan Rechmaoui has laid out a facsimile of the map of Beirut in shallow relief in rubber and recreated a ruined apartment block as a scale model in concrete, wood and metal. This kind of protest work is the lingua franca of international Biennales but there is still an immediate excitement in seeing the politics of this part of the world not through the familiar images of television news but through the language of contemporary art.
Nor is it all a moan about how terrible life is over there. Palestinian artist Wafa Hourani’s models of the West Bank re-imagines it ambivalently as a quaint Utopia with hidden gardens and brightly coloured decorative TV aerials amid the shuttered shops and tiny alleyways of the refugee camp, where the security wall erected by Israel has become a mirror.

The highlights of the show come in the paintings. Iraqi Ahmed Alsoudani captures the violence of occupied Baghdad in dense compositions that look like frozen explosions of body parts, agonised faces and fragments of buildings. Rokni Haerizadeh’s deft, loose brushwork and strong palette quickly draws you into scenes of wedding parties and funerals in Iran. Tala Madani’s best paintings, with their bright pinks and oranges, have a graffiti-like lightness and drippy spontaneity that recalls Basquiat — yet the influence of the flatness and intricacy of classical Persian painting are evident.

Of course, you still play spot the turkey at a Saatchi exhibition. His marquee piece — a room full of life-size figures of praying Arab women made of tin foil — relies for its impact on being excessively large and shiny, the worst vice of contemporary art. Like me, you may baulk at criticising the work of a man with the biography of Halim Al-Karim, who, says the catalogue, opposed Saddam’s military regime and "took to hiding in the desert, living for almost three years in a hole in the ground covered by a pile of rocks". But you may still not warm to his maudlin soft-focus black-and-white photos.

But these criticisms are quickly forgotten in front of the work of Ramin Haerizadeh. He makes digitally composed images of his bearded face and hairy limbs and richly patterned Eastern fabrics in a style that recalls Persian miniature paintings from 300 years ago. Such delicacy, such originality, such sexual ambiguity!
Until 6 May. Information: 020 7823 2363; www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk.

Unveiled: New Art From The Middle East
Saatchi Gallery
Duke Of York's HQ, King's Road, SW3 4SQ