New Blood on the walls

want modern spaces for their modern art.

While some dismissed the wood panelling as unfit for contemporary art, over the past year he has noticed that his visitors feel more at ease in grandeur. The corridors, for example, have become central to his vision, and he has furnished their extensive displays with more sophisticated lighting.

"I've changed a lot of the installations as I've had to face up to my mistakes and have seen what works and what doesn't. Like the early days of Boundary Road, it takes a while to get things right." Much criticised for splitting the Works from the Chapman Family Collection installation into two rooms, he has now restored them into a single space.

Saatchi listens intently to critics. In the beginning, his gallery was one of the few places in London with totally fresh work. Its success inspired other galleries which, in turn, gave the art world the sense that it had seen it all elsewhere. New Blood should draw the critics back in. "I don't have the temperament to turn this into a temple to Nineties art," says Saatchi. "I get far too much pleasure finding new things and showing them off."

In the gallery's first major space - once home to a sliced Hirst cow, and more recently the Chapmans' Hell vitrines - Saatchi is to bring several artists together. Conrad Shawcross's huge spinning machine will occupy one side of the space in contrast to the caravan constructed by Brian Griffiths out of recycled, varnished, wooden furniture.

Francis Upritchard's stuffed monkey - which earned the Camden Arts Centre a bellyaching from animalrights activists - will be shown with her mummified figure that rattles around the broken-up parquet floor.

Saatchi is aggressively pushing new painting. He has great faith in Daniel Richter, a German, and Tal R, who is Danish. He likes their bold irreverence. Markus Muntean and Adi Rosenblum make formally composed, highly sexualised paintings of listless teenagers, complete with philosophically oblique captions.

Michael Fullerton is one of my own hopes for new painting. His deftly worked portrait of Vidal Sassoon's Mother is already an understated and ironic classic. These sit well with Paula Rego's later works, an artist Saatchi has pursued for many years. He extols a return to form by Mat Collishaw, whose 15ft mosaics of a lynching and a cat being tortured define a "terrible beauty".

SAATCHI seems most excited by a new pair of self-portrait neons, suitably offensive, by Tim Noble and Sue Webster. He knows the stir they are going to cause, and the lines that will form outside the darkened room that will house them.

There is a confidence to his approach that is unalloyed and uncompromised. When we popped into the Serpentine's State of Play exhibition last week, he was both amused and disappointed that Martin Creed's stack of floor tiles had been surrounded by a barrier to prevent less discerning viewers from tripping over it. There are no barriers at the Saatchi gallery, even around works such as Tracey Emin's Bed which, he feels, have gone beyond shock, and are now being appreciated carefully by viewers.

"Artists make art that reflects the world we live in," says Saatchi, "and the public gets round to it much quicker these days if it is any good. It drives me insane to see so many big contemporary shows where inaccessibility is worn like some badge of pride. If museums regularly produce art shows where most of the public feel 'this isn't for me', they are entirely missing the point."

The Saatchi Gallery's anniversary show can be seen from 20 March. Information: 020 7823 2363.