The Evening Standard offers a long profile of Kay Hartenstein Saatchi who has co-curated an exhibition at Selfridges for Frieze:
For a time after the divorce she reverted to her maiden name, Kay Hartenstein, and avoided the “incestuous” art world. But eventually she realised she was selling herself short. After all, she had worked alongside Charles for 15 years hanging and curating 30 of the shows at the Saatchi Gallery — culminating in the 1997 Sensation show at the Royal Academy.
So now she’s Kay Saatchi again. […] In 1986, she sublet her apartment and helped set up a London gallery, showing the likes of Bridget Riley. Later she left to work as director of Waddington’s contemporary department on shows by Howard Hodgkin and Julian Schnabel.
She met Charles — who had opened the Saatchi Gallery on Boundary Road with his first wife Doris, also a blonde Southern belle — and they fell in love talking about paintings. When she realised he’d only been separated from Doris for six days, she held out for nine months until she was satisfied the split was genuine.
She became his unofficial co-curator. Their six-storey Chelsea home was littered with artworks from Hirst’s sheep in a tank of formaldehyde in the reception to Jenny Saville’s monumental nudes in the kitchen. But as she became a wife and then a mother, Charles’s feelings for her seemed to diminish. In the last years, he was more interested spending the evenings go-kart racing.
Special Kay Saatchi (This Is London/Evening Standard)
