The Battersea Trilogy comprises three masterpieces from British contemporary artist Sacha Jafri (b.1977).
The three original artworks have been kept in the artist’s personal collection and have never before come to market.
Sacha Jafri is an artist known for his visually intense paintings and these large canvases are from his 2007 series Disappearing Landscapes. The Battersea Trilogy was painted in the ascendancy of Jafri’s stellar career, months before his 10-year retrospective at the Saatchi Gallery in 2008.
In his signature Magical Realism style, Jafri depicts Battersea Power Station as a monument to human achievement. The Grade II listed building was most famously featured on Pink Floyd’s 1977 album cover Animals, instantly becoming an iconic cultural landmark.
Jafri enters a meditative state when painting, and his artworks manifest as multi-layered explosions of his subconscious onto the canvas, the product of a communion between his own mind and the soul of the subject. His expansive colour palette reacts to Battersea Power Station’s changing atmosphere at three different times of day, capturing both the beauty and spirit of the historic building in various lights. In each artwork the central Power Station anchors a composition finely balanced between figuration and lyrical abstraction, testament to Jafri’s technical mastery of the paint.
Battersea by Moonlight
One of Jafri’s most revered pieces from his 18yr Retrospective Collection, a poignant and historic depiction of Battersea Power Station, from the south side of the river in Chelsea, underneath the iridescent light of the Moon...
Battersea at Night
One of Jafri’s most revered pieces from his 18yr Retrospective Collection, a poignant and historic depiction of Battersea Power Station, from the south side of the river in Chelsea at dusk as the night draws in...
Battersea by Day
One of Jafri’s most revered pieces from his 18yr Retrospective Collection, a poignant and historic depiction of Battersea Power Station, from North of the River by Day...
“Sacha seems to have taken the work of Jackson Pollock one step further as well as understand the ‘line’ of Degas and express the spirit and movement of Kandinsky. His work is truly exciting and, now, highly collected.”
- Evening Standard Magazine
“Jafri’s pieces are the physical results of his own investigative journey, painting what is real and what is beautiful, not what is learned or shocking. In an era dominated by conceptualism, Jafri wants to draw our attention once again to painting.”
- Saatchi Magazine
“Unlike the Surrealists, who took objects out of their natural environment and called them surreal, I aim to keep the object within its natural environment and yet still create something that feels surreal but in now in fact called ‘Magically Real’. It is true to its original form and natural environment and is therefore recognisable as a true representation of reality.”
- Sacha Jafri
“Jafri’s particular use of colour can be said to have a distinctly Eastern quality due to the cacophony of vibrant hues co-existing on one surface plane. It is a consciousness that explains the explosion of bright hues and tonalities in his latest collection of paintings depicting various parts of London, far from representative of the often yellow-grey skies. For example, an unusually warm red highlights the shape around the smokestacks with a yellow arch defining the bridge in Battersea Power Station at Night; a typically industrial scene is given life.”
- Swapna Tamhane, Art Critic and Curator
“I aim to remind the viewer of the magic and the dream world that surrounds us within our everyday natural environment. Communication takes place on a level beyond conversation, and space is breached not by time but by a relationship with something or someone in the distance.”
- Sacha Jafri