Jenny Saville

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Exploring nuances in portraiture from the late nineteenth century to today—and testing the very definition of the genre— Person of Interest presents depictions of the literal and abstracted body from Sheldon’s rich holdings and selected loans.

This beautifully produced monograph is an important addition to the library on one of the world's most influential and enduring living painters. Gayford also spoke with the artist about her works in the exhibition Jenny Saville: Latent at Gagosian, rue de Castiglione, Paris.

The volume is dedicated to the work of Jenny Saville (Cambridge, 1970), one of the greatest contemporary painters and a leading voice in the international art scene. In doing so, it prompts conversations about race and representation, institutional power, and lived experiences.

A graduate of the Glasgow School of Art in 1992, she has since exhibited, among other museums and galleries, at the Gagosian Galleries in New York and Beverly Hills, the Museo d’Arte Contemporanea in Rome, and the Royal Academy of Art. Placing multiple figures together ('Fulcrum') or conjoined or simply overloading the capacity of a sitter's stool emphasizes the magnitude of her thoughts on her very large canvases. Born in 1970 in Cambridge, England, Saville attended the Glasgow School of Art from 1988 to 1992, spending a term at the University of Cincinnati in 1991. I find the shock value of some of the subjects a little old, but have no problem because the pure application of paint and line is so very beautiful.Between 1999 and 2002 he wrote, presented, and filmed the fifteen-part A History of Britain for BBC Television. Her time with the surgeon fueled her examination into the seemingly infinite ways that flesh is transformed and disfigured.

Jenny Saville (born 1970) studied at the Glasgow School of Art in the late 1980s and early ’90s before becoming associated with the loose generational cohort of painters and sculptors known as the Young British Artists (YBAs). I’ve looked at his drawings and sculptures all my life and probably wouldn’t have made paintings like Propped (1992) without seeing the way he made knees push out and twist. Published on the occasion of Jenny Saville: Elpis, an exhibition of new portraits by the artist at Gagosian, New York. Huge, naked bodies, with a carnal physicality and oppressed by a weight that is more existential than material, Saville is linked to the great European pictorial tradition in constant comparison with the modernism of Willem de Kooning and Cy Twombly and the portraiture of Pablo Picasso and Francis Bacon.

For the third episode of the online event series Gagosian Premieres, Jenny Saville will celebrate her exhibition Elpis at Gagosian New York with painter Nathaniel Mary Quinn and historian Simon Schama, with a performance by the Aaron Diehl Trio, who will play music by Philip Glass as well as a new composition inspired by the work on view. In 1992, the year she completed her studies at Glasgow School of Art, her graduation exhibition sold out. Saville had been captivated with these details since she was a child; she has spoken of seeing the work of Titian and Tintoretto on trips with her uncle, and of observing the way that her piano teacher’s two breasts—squished together in her shirt—became one large mass. It also features a poem by Anna Akhmatova, whose work Saville learned about while she was in Russia, where she photographed many of the models pictured in the paintings.

The portrait I painted that is being featured in the Artist Spotlight series was made with these ideas in mind. I don't know if it's the same for other artists, but the more I do it, the more the medium itself has take a position.Saville has specialized in subjects on the margins of society: the obese, the disfigured, and transsexuals; yet under her fluctuating light and painstaking hues and layers, her subjects transcend their strangeness to take on a universal quality.