YGAs* set to take BritArt by storm

* Young German Artists

It may be the beginning of the end for BritArt. Vastly expensive, habitually hyped and predictably shocking, the work of the YBAs (Young British Artists) is having to make way for the new passion among wealthy collectors and international art-market speculators: the Young German Artists.

The buying habits of the multi-millionaire collector Charles Saatchi can shape art markets. Mr Saatchi is credited with "making" celebrated BritArtists, such as Damien Hirst, the Chapman brothers and Tracey Emin, but over the past 18 months he has been discreetly buying up work by young continental artists in their 20s and 30s, including several Germans.

Now, The Independent on Sunday has learnt, another major international art buyer, the Korean property magnate-turned-artist CI Kim, has focused his attentions on Germany. Mr Kim, who, like Mr Saatchi, has been an avid collector of British contemporary art, has just completed his own hurried shopping spree in Leipzig and Berlin. The IoS understands that he has bought around 20 works by various YGAs. Mr Kim's office would not reveal the amount he spent in Germany, but on a similar spree in London last August, he is believed to have paid several million pounds for works including Charity, Damien Hirst's massive bronze statue of a disabled-girl collection box.

Mr Kim's office told the IoS yesterday: "He is interested in this art because they have such a distinctive character and style." And, of course, if you've a few hundred thousand pounds to spare, new German art could also prove to be a very good investment.

Though yet to command the vast sums paid for some of the BritArt oeuvre, many YGA works are believed to be selling for between £20,000 and £100,000 - the kind of amounts achieved in the early days of the BritArt boom.

Mr Kim has already amassed the largest collection of contemporary British art outside the UK, housed in a specially built gallery complex in the city of Cheonan, Korea. He now intends to create one of the world's great repositories of recent German art.

Such is the current feeding frenzy among buyers for the work of German painters and sculptors that experts say Leipzig, the powerhouse of the country's burgeoning art industry, has sold out of new art. There is now a waiting list of up to three years to acquire new work.

Since the 1960s, a series of German artists have attracted international attention, notably Josef Beuys, Anselm Kiefer and Sigmar Polke. The city of Cologne provided much of the energy behind the modern art resurgence of the 1980s. More recently, the conceptual photographer Thomas Ruff and the Leipzig painter Neo Rauch have received critical acclaim.

Mr Kim is believed to have bought at least one work by Tobias Lehner, a 24-year-old Leipzig painter, while Mr Saatchi is believed to have bought several works by the Berlin-based painter Jonathan Meese. One of these, the huge, three-panel Temptation of the State of the Blessed Ones in Archland, was unveiled in January at the Saatchi Gallery in London.

Temptation is among many European works bought by Mr Saatchi over the past 18 months, and will feature in the New Blood exhibition, which opens next month at the Saatchi Gallery. It marks a clean break with Mr Saatchi's almost exclusively BritArt tastes of the past 10 years.

Including work by several Germans, as well as artists from Belgium, Japan, New Zealand, Israel and the United States, the exhibition will contain only a smattering of young British artists, among them the 26-year-old conceptualist Conrad Shawcross, son of the writer and journalist William Shawcross.

"New German art is being very strongly collected by collectors and banks from within the country," says Jari Lager of the Union Projects gallery in London. "But there are also a few major private collectors in Britain who are now making their first purchases and contacts and visits to Germany.

"The Leipzig artists have sold out of their work - you can't buy anything," she adds. "Everything has been bought. There are around a dozen artists there who are doing very, very well."

According to Anna Somers Cocks, founding editor of The Art Newspaper, the rise of the YGAs began across the Atlantic. "The reason the Germans have become strong is because the Americans adopted German contemporary art with a vengeance about five years ago," she says.

"The Germans have a school of photographers who produce enormous architectural images. The Americans like photography anyway, but these Germans are by far the best photographic artists around."