Showdown

The Next Saatchi Online Showdown Competition: “Bright Lights, Big City”

I’ve always been interested in approaching a big city in a train, and I can’t exactly describe the sensations, but they’re entirely human and perhaps have nothing to do with aesthetics. There is a certain fear and anxiety and a great visual interest in the things that one sees coming into a great city.

– Edward Hopper

From the ancient world to the present day, artists have been drawn to the urban landscape. Frescoes in Pompeii, Renaissance paintings by Lorenzetti and Carpaccio, Vermeer’s famous View of Delft, paintings by Manet, Caillebotte, Leger, Whistler, Hopper and Lowry, to name just a few, all capture the cityscape and what makes urban living distinct. It might be the loneliness of city life, as in the hands of Hopper, the brutal yet exhilarating modern city portrayed by Leger, or the industrial city of Lowry’s “matchstick men” paintings.

Thinking about artists as diverse as these has inspired us to choose the next Showdown theme “Bright Lights, Big City”. Given the great tradition of the cityscape throughout the history of art, we’d like to see your depictions of the urban landscape. It could be the city at night or empty at dawn; the city as architectural wonder, or as a place for work; an aerial view or the urban terrain seen close up at street level.

You can submit work in any medium (painting, photography, sculpture, collage, drawing etc) and in any genre (figurative, abstract, realist, etc).

Stay tuned for details on judges, dates, submission tips, and more.  We hope you’ll take part in the “Bright Lights, Big City” Showdown and look forward to being inspired by what the city evokes in you as an artist.