Sorry Damien, however hard you try, you've become passe

PICKLED sheep and half-built installations are out. The new generation of young British artists believe they have had their time. Today's young Turks prefer to use paint, photography and sculpture rather than video and dead animals.

They have turned their backs (for now at least) on the artistic styles of such thirtysomething elders as Damien Hirst, Rachel Whiteread and Tracey Emin.

The new generation of young British artists are largely in their early twenties. They term themselves the "new neurotic realists" and their subject matter is more likely to be a grittily naturalistic tableau of a woman having her home taken away than Tracey Emin's tent with lovers' names embroidered on it.

Now 34 of these artists are about to be launched on to the scene by the collector and gallery owner Charles Saatchi, the key figure behind last year's "Sensation" exhibition which featured Hirst and his cohorts.

But while Sensation was drawing crowds at the Royal Academy, Mr Saatchi was scouring small alternative artist-run warehouse and studio shows to find the next generation of trendsetters. He will be exhibiting their work next January. A catalogue, The New Neurotic Realism, featuring their art is published by the Saatchi Gallery next Monday. The works in the book show the concerns of the new neurotic realists.

A mounted photographic print by Tom Hunter is entitled Woman Reading Possession Order. The woman bathed in light in the sparse flat with her baby in a work full of pathos has a clear reference to Vermeer'spainting of a pregnant lady reading a letter saying her husband is not coming home.

Nicky Hoberman's oil paintings of children hint at their sexuality. Martin Maloney's colourful figurative works on home, office and party scenes are described expansively in the catalogue as "late Picasso blends with Hockney ... he transcribes Poussin through rave culture".

The catalogue adds about young painters Karl Maughan, Victoria Chalmers and Rosie Snell: "Celebrating painterly skill, they used domesticity and a familiar English type of documentary drama. They tread a realist path which does not reflect transatlantic modishness. They claim a peculiar heritage, revisiting the skill of the deeply unfashionable Stanley Spencer.

"Maughan's perfect flower borders threaten in their photographic clarity. Snell's landscape paintings trace a path of American Gothic straight to Andrew Wyeth. Chalmers paints a cool portrait of nervous disturbance. By picking up on the underlying, kitchen sink nostalgia of the Britcool phenomena this group of painters suddenly found their documentary style a strength."

Paul Smith, 29, a former soldier, creates photographs using himself to play every role, of squaddies at work and again in Make My Night on Saturday nights out which rapidly degenerate into violence. He said: "Hopefully, we are bringing a fresh approach to things. I have taken friends to art galleries and they find it intimidating. I am trying to look for a more grass-roots understanding of the work."

Roger Hiorns, 23, who has made a sculpture of Notre Dame out of card construction with cobalt and copper chemical mounted on glass, added: "We don't despise Hirst and the Sensation crowd. They opened things up. But we don't feel such pressure to perform. We're all more secure."

Jenny Blyth, curator at the Saatchi Gallery, said: "Damien and his peers are essentially conceptual artists. These new people are concerned with realism. The work produced ... will maintain an international focus on British contemporary art."

The art critic Dick Price, who wrote the foreword to the catalogue, adds: "A fresh trend is emerging, swimming against the currents of the past few years. The art which is now emerging into view shakes off the ironical one-liner stance, the cynical indifference, the cult of artist as superstar ... the aggression which has been so fashionable, are no longer central to this group. Cynicism is finally passe, and the art star a bore."