BOILER ROOM ARTIST

@ The Museum of New Art

In the art world, Charles Saatchi’s name is already written in stone. To some he is the greatest thing that ever happened to contemporary art. His passion for art is unquestioned. To others, however, he is a dealer in collector's stock, using his influence to manipulate the market. He buys an artist's work in bulk and at low prices, then watches. There are many takers for the Charles Saatchi brand. Art prices can both rocket and plummet at his whim.

There once was a time - and it wasn't so long ago - that Mr Saatchi used to spend his Saturday mornings trawling the edgier, grungier, not-yet-gentrified areas of London for up-and-coming, smart young art talent.

The British collector still goes shopping on Saturday mornings, but these days he mostly stays closer to home in Chelsea. And his discoveries now tend to be more modest when you consider his latest stumble on an art find in the downstairs of his new Chelsea gallery at Sloane Square.

Karl Strumpf

was born in Graz, Austria in 1950 but moved with his parents to England as a young boy. He now lives in works in London.

Upon surveying recent renovation in the basement of his new Chelsea gallery at Sloane Square, influential art collector Charles Saatchi was startled by 56 year-old Karl Strumpf's boiler room walls which were spattered with mud patching and of half-finished drips and rollered paint. "My God, this is what great art should be." said Saatchi. "Something that gives real visual pleasure and makes you sit up and think, not the pseudo-controversial rehashed claptrap that so many actually believe is cutting-edge art." 

Strumpf's only formal studies have been at the British Gypsum Drywall Academy training centre at East Leake, in Leicestershire. Several sections of his still fresh walls have already been cut away and mounted on supports, so that they may be exhibited as their own piece under the collective title String Theories when Saatchi’s gallery opens in 2007.

Plenty of people have had the dream of finding a lost or hidden masterpiece in their attic, but how does one respond to what they find a common worker doing in their basement? Mr Saatchi isn’t alone in his convictions of this underground art and its potential on the art market. Such "isolation and visual focus denotes importance: the greater the masterpiece, the greater its separation from other objects that might compete for attention." Victoria Newhouse writes in her book, Art and the Power of Placement.

Strumpf's boiler room art has been likened to the recent discovery of British cave paintings in Church Hole cave in Creswell Crags, Derbyshire. It is that important to Mr Saatchi, who almost never grants interviews or speaks publicly. He has described the fresh drywall work in his gallery's basement as "infinitely more exciting than almost anything seen upstairs in years".