Philip Colbert: The Battle for Lobsteropolis at Saatchi Gallery

Colbert’s The Battle for Lobsteropolis successfully overwhelms viewers with large-scale oil paintings resembling unfinished renders for a video game, elements of a crashed screensaver and the composition of a Dutch master. They are littered with details that compel you to check swords for the reflection of something unique or coat patterns for hints of providence, but your search is left empty with the same sensation of finding that third finger in an AI-generated image.

The exhibition consists of a series of AI-assisted paintings and three sculptures depicting a fictional battle between armoured lobsters and other beings spread evenly across a rectangular room on Saatchi’s ground floor. It is fittingly adjacent to the gift shop, with its glossy imagery and plastic appearance, a style which can be found on Colbert’s merchandise website being sold for up to a thousand pounds.

This is exactly what Colbert wants you to see. The over-saturation of digital consumption – brain rot in the flesh – blended into oil paintings that are reminiscent of the walls of the world’s most renowned museums, as if to say these images endure and the impetus of history in today’s digital age is as powerful as ever. But in this particular exhibition, the images fall flat (despite their three-dimensional appearance).

Colbert’s concept has a depth to it – the lobster is only red once dead and this is the stage in which he depicts the now mythic creature, it contradicts in exhibitions at antiquities museums beside classics, as it did at the Archaeological Museum of Naples, and bridges the art historical with the digital. But between the white walls of the Saatchi Gallery, the lobster is just a thumbnail for Colbert’s ever-expanding crustacean universe. He has been dubbed “the new Andy Warhol”, an artist lauded for critiquing mass consumerism and cash grabs, whilst doing exactly that. Lobsteropolis sees Colbert veering further away from the folkloric yet pop take on the lobster and further into the lobster as a mass-produced gimmick.

Perihaan Khan
Photo: Courtesy of Saatchi Gallery

Philip Colbert: The Battle for Lobsteropolis is at the Saatchi Gallery from 29^th November 2024 until 13^th January 2025. For further information or to book visit the exhibition’s website here.