On 25 October 2009, the State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg and the Saatchi Gallery, London will jointly present Newspeak: British Art Now, an exhibition of new art from Britain, featuring many artists who have emerged in the UK in the last few years and are largely unknown in the wider art world. The exhibition which opened in the Picket Hall of the Winter Palace is the contribution of the PRC to the Year of China in Russia.

This exciting exhibition forms part of the "Hermitage 20/21" project, an ambitious programme aimed at showcasing the best of contemporary art in the Hermitage and expanding the display of 20th century art.

Over a decade after Sensation and the advent of the YBAs, a new generation of artists has arrived, whose work collectively reveals an arresting insight into the future of contemporary art in Britain. In Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, Newspeak is "the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year"; this exhibition turns that Orwellian vision on its head, showing that the range of visual languages being exploited and invented by these artists is in fact expanding and multiplying. Through sculpture, painting, photography and installation, they explore issues such as class, consumerism and the phenomenon of instant success culture, often with a distinctly British dry wit.

The first section of this exhibition will premiere at the State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg, while an expanded version in two parts will open at the Saatchi Gallery in London starting summer 2010 through to January 2011. The Hermitage exhibition will be shown in the Nikolaevsky Hall of the Winter Palace, a magnificent gallery looking out over the Neva River.

This autumn, the BBC will broadcast Saatchi Art Stars, a new TV series aimed to discover the next generation of artistic talent in Britain. Following a selection process, six people have been chosen to attend an art school established specially for them, where they will develop their work under the tutelage of leading British artists and teachers. The winner's work, chosen by Tracey Emin, artist Matthew Collings, broadcaster and writer on art Frank Cohen, collector, Kate Bush, Head of Art Galleries, Barbican and Charles Saatchi, will be exhibited in Newspeak: British Art Now, both at the State Hermitage Museum and the Saatchi Gallery. The winner will also receive a free Chelsea studio for 3 years as part of a bursary provided by the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea in partnership with the Saatchi Gallery.

Newspeak: British Art Now in St Petersburg features a selection of works by Hurvin Anderson, Jonathan Baldock, Pablo Bronstein, Spartacus Chetwynd, Steven Claydon, William Daniels, Dick Evans, Tessa Farmer, Robert Fry, Sigrid Holmwood, Mustafa Hulusi, Scott King, littlewhitehead, Alastair MacKinven, Goshka Macuga, Ryan Mosley, Arif Ozakca, Ged Quinn, Barry Reigate, Daniel Silver, Fergal Stapleton, Donald Urquhart, Jonathan Wateridge and Toby Ziegler.

Prof. Mikhail Piotrovsky, Director of the State Hermitage Museum and the Head of the "Hermitage 20/21" project and Dmitry Ozerkov, Ph.D., Curator of the exhibition and Senior Researcher at the State Hermitage Museum have worked closely with the Saatchi Gallery in order to bring the show to St Petersburg. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue which includes an introductory essay by Mikhail Piotrovsky, and essays by Dmitry Ozerkov, and Patricia Ellis.

The Steppe Story exhibition of Zorikto Dorzhiev opens in the Marble Palace on 20 August. The exhibition presents over 50 paintings, graphic works and sculptures by the young artist whose oeuvre is closely connected with Buryat and Mongolian legends and mythology: the Asian myth rendered by European expressive means.

Zorikto Dorzhiev was born in 1976 in Ulan-Ude. He studied at the local school of art and then at the Krasnoyarsk Institute of Art, and trained at the Russian Academy of Arts studios. Zorikto managed to take the most essential thing from his academic study - disciplined morphogenesis which proved not to contradict conceptualism.

The artist develops his own version of oriental poetics with its refined elongated silhouettes, muted colours and a kind of somnambulistic self-absorption apparent in the characters. For him, it is the truth of emotional states which is important: an unrestrained impulse, an extreme physical tension, an intellectual stand-off and meditation. Yet the artist perceives himself as a participant in events rather than an observer. He did not so much reconstitute this worldview as actually went through it, supported by his own emotional and life experience.

St Petersburg is another venue of the exhibition of Dorzhiev's works travelling through the world: New York, Miami, Los Angeles and Moscow. The Khankhalaev Gallery arranged this tour and contributed to the museum's presentation of Zorikto Dorzhiev's oeuvre in St Petersburg.

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In the XX and XXI centuries the art along with human and his world, visible and imaginary reality became the topic of a creativity. The large conceptual exhibition "Art about art" is dedicated to this topic. The exposition contains of 130 works of art: printmaking, painting, photo-art, electronic art, art-objects. For the first time the works of A. Mylnikov, R. Lihtenshtein, T. Novikov, V. Yakovlev, I. Kabakov, G. Korzhev, D. Zhilinskij, A Kosolapov take part together in one project. In these works of art the audience may find the ironical use of the known stories, stylistic and semantic allusions, quoting and open appropriation of the alien images, free "copies" of the works of art, that are made by other painters, endless serious and parody references to the history of art. more>