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Jenny Saville

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One word to describe Saville’s work is carnal. And some of her most affecting works are the self-portraits of her with her young children. Mark Stevens calls them mammalian, because “they remember, restore, and respect the animal link between mother and child that exists before words, a connection more ancient than humankind itself.” They are not totally novel: Saville is painting within a tradition. The works directly reference drawings of the Virgin and child by Leonardo da Vinci and other maternal archetypes from the canon. GAY: I edited a collection of essays by myself and others called Unruly Bodies [for Gay Mag in 2018]. I think the bodies that challenge our cultural norms are always going to interest me. Change the plan you will roll onto at any time during your trial by visiting the “Settings & Account” section. What happens at the end of my trial? GAY: That makes sense. I certainly have other forms of criticism in my life: editors and trusted readers.

NCOn Picasso and Cubism, there’s also his incredible, very late self-portrait from 1972, the year before he died. This is a work in which we can see how motherhood had influenced the artist. The work is another Jenny Seville self-portrait in which she portrays herself being far along in her pregnancy, whilst struggling to keep hold of two infants. The painting references Renaissance Nativity scenes, but it is created in a rather chaotic style, creating a feeling of urgency and panic. If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month. Saville draws upon a wide range of sources in her work, including medical and forensic text books, children’s drawings, graffiti and online images, as well as celebrated paintings and drawings of the past. In more recent years, Saville has created works in which she layers images, often drawing on several different sources. Working between the figurative and abstract, she has chosen to use charcoal and pastel in many of these works, attracted by the transparency they offer. These materials allow Saville to work organically, layering and erasing her media to blend and merge bodily forms and abstract gestures. The resulting works, such as One out of two (symposium) (2016), capture a sense of motion and fluidity. These restless images provide no fixed point, but rather suggest the perception of simultaneous realities. In this way, the body yet again resembles a landscape, and in this work, in particular, Saville referred to the painting as a “gender landscape”.

JSThe late pastels—they just fly. I mean, Degas can be seen as this straightforward artist who painted dancers, and people see him as quite an academic artist. But if you just stand in front of those late pastels and look: that color is broken up. It’s absolutely majestic. Small sections can be like a Willem de Kooning painting. And he did that because those pastels come in incredible colors.

This cover grabbed the attention of Charles Saatchi, an important art collector, and advertising executive. Saatchi offered Saville an 18-month contract where she could create monumental oil paintings with financial support. NICHOLAS CULLINANI wanted to begin by asking you about the new self-portrait that you’ve been working on. Could you talk about that work and the process of making it?JSI think one of the reasons why colors come into my paintings so much is because I use pastels and oil bars as intermediaries between drawing and painting. Pastels come in the most incredible range of beautiful colors; when I work with this group of pastels, all the colors are just sitting there. With oil paint there’s a more limited range, and I mix the actual tones. If I need to distinguish the side of a cheek from the front face of a cheek, I can mix a precise tone to do that job. In pastels I can’t do that because they come in a set range, so it’s forced—at the beginning it drove me mad, I couldn’t hit that note properly. It forced my hand to come up with another way to make the tone. An artist like Degas uses slats, squiggles, and layers in different colors of pastel to create the tone he’s after. Some of these colors are electric when you identify them individually. So I started to experiment with the same technique, using stronger colors on top of each other to make the tone or to do the job of the tone itself. That’s helped my painting a lot. There are several important Jenny Saville drawings and paintings that can be discussed as seminal works by the artist. Chrisél Attewell (b. 1994) is a multidisciplinary artist from South Africa. Her work is research-driven and experimental. Inspired by current socio-ecological concerns, Attewell’s work explores the nuances in people’s connection to the Earth, to other species, and to each other. She works with various mediums, including installation, sculpture, photography, and painting, and prefers natural materials, such as hemp canvas, oil paint, glass, clay, and stone. Four painted metal sculptures and wall-based works by Sara Barker show the ways in which the Glasgow-based artist layers materials and processes to investigate the act of making. Barker breaks apart the traditional categories of painting, sculpture and drawing, combining these and other techniques such as collage in her practice. Influenced by writers such as Virginia Woolf and Jeanette Winterson, Barker’s works are often concerned with both physical and mental spaces.

SAVILLE: Surely we can do better than this. I’ve noticed that there are loads of women working in the art world. If I do a show in a museum, you can pretty much guarantee that all the people around the table will be women. But still, at the head of the table, the director is almost always a man. It’s like this in nearly every country I show in. For me, female art advisers are the unsung heroes for women artists. They’ve convinced wealthy collectors to increase the diversity of their collections, and have played a huge role in increasing the visibility of a whole range of artists. GAY: I mean, some of that confidence is “fake it ’til you make it.” But at the same time, I have really strong boundaries, so if I’m being vulnerable, it’s something that I can handle being vulnerable about. When I wrote Hunger, I knew it would be met with cruelty. But I did it anyway. SAVILLE: It’s also part of the branding. Identity becomes a way to sell or a way to promote the work, but it then acts as a veil between the audience and the work’s content. NCWhat’s interesting about what’s on the walls in your studio is that the selection collapses any distinction between contemporary, historic, figurative, abstract, high, low.This work is part of Saville’s series titled Continuum, and it investigates how the female body is affected by pregnancy and childbirth. During this time, Saville also began to reference the feelings and emotions associated with motherhood, which dramatically challenged how motherhood had historically been represented in art history. SAVILLE: It definitely makes me reflect on how important artistic freedom is—not just having it, but exercising it. Had I been born fifty years earlier, I probably never would have been taken seriously as a woman artist. No gallery would have signed me on. So I want to take advantage of the moment I live in. Human perception of the body is so acute and knowledgeable that the smallest hint of a body can trigger recognition. Jenny Saville’s Depictions of Surgery and Images from Medical Books Cindy by Jenny Saville, 1993, via Christie’s

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