Section:GDN 1J PaGe:8 Edition Date:190803 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 2/8/2019 16:42 cYanmaGentaYellowblac

• The Guardian Sat urday 3 Aug ust 2019

8 Obituaries

E

arly in 1986 a

gallery opened on

Charlotte Street in

Fitzrovia, London,

across from the

advertising agency

Saatchi & Saatchi.

Its 25-year-old

owner seemed the picture of a

certain kind of Englishman: small,

solid, with unruly fair hair and

gold-rimmed spectacles. He wore,

as such Englishmen do, well-cut

tweeds; it being the Thatcher era,

there was no surprise to hear him

say that he meant to have a million

pounds in his pocket by his 30th

birthday. Despite appearances

to the contrary, the gallerist was

neither British nor a yuppie.

Karsten Schubert, who has died

of thyroid cancer at the age of 57,

Karsten Schubert

Enterprising gallerist

and major infl uence on

the success of the

Young British Artists

was German; and he played an

unparalleled part in promoting the

group that would come to be known

as the Young British Artists ( YBAs ).

Until setting up on his own,

Schubert had been at the Lisson

Gallery – which, as he later said,

“was where British art of the 80s

happened”. In the years before

Damien Hirst ’s 1988 Freeze

exhibition, the Lisson was the only

London gallery open to the work of

young and undiscovered artists.

Sensing the need for another,

and convincing the dealer Richard

Salmon to back him, Schubert set

about fi lling his stable. His fi rst

exhibition was of the sculptor Alison

Wilding , whose work he continued

to show until his death. It was

in 1988, though, that he met the

group with which his name would

become most closely associated.

Through the artist Michael Craig-

Martin , Schubert visited the degree

show at Goldsmiths College (now

Goldsmiths, University of London).

That year three of the art school’s

new graduates – Gary Hume ,

Michael Landy and Ian Davenport –

had their fi rst West End exhibition at

Karsten Schubert Limited.

T

his was followed

by a series of shows

that helped both to

put the YBAs on the

map and to defi ne

their aesthetic. In

October 1991 came

an event entitled

preserve ‘beauty’ , in which another

young Goldsmiths artist, Anya

Gallaccio, fi lled Schubert’s Charlotte

Street window with 800 gerberas,

whose rotting red slime oozed down

the glass. The following year came

Landy’s Closing Down Sale , the artist

converting the gallery into a pound

shop complete with cheap consumer

goods and day-glo signs that read

“Going Out of Business ”.

These last proved unhappily

prophetic. In part due to Schubert’s

own energy, the market for new

art overheated and collapsed.

Far from having made a million

pounds, he had, by the age of 30,

lost it. So, too, had Salmon. The pair

parted company in 1993, Schubert

re opening his business in smaller

premises in nearby Foley Street.

By this time the YBAs he had

helped to invent had begun to

desert him. Tact was not always

Schubert’s strong point: shortly

after Landy’s last show, he had sent

a letter around the gallery’s artists

outlining the need to trim “dead

wood”. This resulted in a number of

wounded departures. When, in 1993,

Schubert criticised Hume’s new

work as lacking in abstract rigour,

Hume, too, took himself elsewhere.

Rachel Whiteread followed suit in

1996, at which point the second

gallery closed.

It did so with typical éclat. The

year before, Schubert, with the

gallerist Thomas Dane and the

publisher Charles Asprey, had

opened a space called Ridinghouse

to the rear of Foley Street. There

they showed works such as Jake

and Dinos Chapman ’s Bring Me the

Head of ... (1995): a video in which

a pair of local prostitutes pleasured

themselves with the nose of the

mask of an Italian dealer to whom

the Chapmans had taken a dislike.

The Ridinghouse name carries

on in a publishing house, producing

high-end works of art history and

criticism, and artists’ monographs.

Schubert was perhaps proudest of

this. For all his love of Britain and

English tailoring – he became a

British citizen not long before his

death – he had a depth of culture

and historical understanding that

remained admirably German.

Born in Berlin, to Ruth (n ee

Herberer) and Gottfried Schubert ,

Karsten was educated at a classical

Gymnasium at Helmstedt in Lower

Schubert

(above) in 2000.

He exhibited

works by a wide

range of artists

including Tess

Jaray (Palace

Red, 1962,

centre) and

Alison Wilding

(Harbour,

1994-96, below)

EAMONN MCCABE/

THE GUARDIAN

Far from

having

made a

million

pounds, he

had, by the

age of 30,

lost it. So,

too, had

his backer

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