ART CITIES: London -Jenny Saville

Jenny Saville was propelled into the art world when her works were shown in Saatchi Gallery as part of the exhibition “Young British Artists III” in 1994. She is known for her enormous canvases that focus on bodies in an unflinching manner. Likening the physicality of paint to the feeling and appearance of skin, Saville constructs sometimes horrifying images of contemporary identity.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: S.M.A.K. Archive

Jenny Saville in her solo exhibition “Erota” at the Gagosian Gallery in London presents a group of recent drawings. Over her career, Saville has taken the depiction of the human form in unprecedented directions. Traditional realism is challenged when she occasionally employs varying points of view in the same picture (the figures themselves are often composites of several bodies) or calls heightened attention to purely formal concerns. Her visceral embodiments confront issues of mortality while attesting to a tenacious formal engagement with the problems and innovations of both classical figuration and radical abstraction. Saville’s works explore, avoid and subvert the entire nature of the male gaze, which she perceives as a driving factor in commonly accepted notions of beauty. In works such as “Branded”, she was willing to become both the painter and the model, the subject and the object. As she explained, “I don’t like to be the one just looking or just looked at. I want both roles”. In the figures of large, sprawling nudes, inspired in part by “Titian to Canaletto: Drawing in Venice”, exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum, Saville demonstrates her acute sensitivity to the problems and challenges faced by Old Masters, while bringing a specifically modern sensibility to bear on classical drawing traditions. The shifting forms and multiple contours of her writhing and coupling figures evoke a world in flux, consistent with the idea that no single reality or perspective can ever be definitive. These corporeal images are like landscapes that reveal themselves to the viewer in real time.

Info: Gagosian Gallery, 17-19 Davies Street, London, Duration: 14/4-28/5/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.gagosian.com