CHARLES SAATCHI, the champion of modern British artists, has excluded homegrown talent from his new exhibition, which opens today.

The multimillionaire art collector will be displaying works by German and Polish painters in the show — the first time one of his exhibitions has not featured a British artist since 1987.

Mr Saatchi has been a collector and exhibitor of British artists for the past 15 years and is widely regarded as an influential force in the Brit Art movement of the 1990s through his acquisition of controversial works such as Tracey Emin’s unmade bed and Damien Hirst’s sharks in formaldehyde.

But not since his New York Now show at his old North London gallery 18 years ago has he opened the doors to a show that excludes British talent.

In a change of direction early last year he began selling off his more sensational pieces or relegating them to the storage rooms. Then came the fire at the Momart warehouse in the East End of London in May last year, which destroyed 144 works in the collection.

Although devastated by the fire, Mr Saatchi continued to offload many of his old favourites, including £16 million of Hirst, and started buying up about 150 paintings from mainly Europe and America. He also sold Marc Quinn’s Self, a cast of the artist’s head in nine pints of his frozen blood.

Mr Saatchi, 62, has now given his entire gallery over to painting and has reportedly told The Art Newspaper that the Young British Artists, who proved such crowd pleasers a decade ago, may be “nothing but footnotes” in art history. “Nothing is as uplifting as standing before a great painting,” he declared.

The Triumph of Painting series is a showcase of different styles including abstract, figurative, landscape and Pop Art.

The Triumph of Painting: Part 2, which opens at the Saatchi Gallery, in London’s County Hall, concentrates on works by one Polish and five German artists and features natural disasters and the fall of communism in Eastern Europe as some of its themes.

The series began in January this year and will run until May 2007. The first collection to be shown featured one British painter, Peter Doig, and the next will feature the Londoner Dexter Dalwood. In the final part of The Triumph of Painting just three of the nineteen artists are British-born.

A spokeswoman for the Saatchi Gallery said: “This is not making a point about the state of British painting. The show just has a very international feel to it. At this stage it is northern European and these artists were particularly strong together.”