Jenny Saville

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JS As a teenager I was fascinated by his work. I even liked the way he looked, with his crazy hair. His work and life spoke to that teenage angst, that rite of passage when you’re unsure about yourself. But at the same time, his line was strong and confident. What a draftsman he was! One of the surest lines in art history.

SAVILLE: For me, the painting wasn’t just about her size—it was just about how beautiful she looked. Some people ask me, how can you think somebody like that is beautiful? But honestly, I just do. After witnessing all these strong reactions to the triptych, I became even more interested in bodies that some might see as “misbehaving,” whether through violence or surgery, or bodies that don’t have a fixed gender—that became a decade’s worth of my work, and in some ways, I’m still exploring that theme. 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. Saville transcends the limits between figurative and abstract, between informal and gestural, managing to transfigure the news into a universal image, which puts the human figure at the center of the history of art. 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. JSHe gave me a lot of confidence growing up. It’s a difficult thing to say, isn’t it now, to say, oh, “He paints the truth.” But Rembrandt is part of a group of artists who never go away. It’s like seeing a Francis Bacon exhibition: it just blows you away. Certain artists really hit—they don’t go in and out of fashion.Jenny Saville’s The Mothers was inspired by art historical depictions of mothers, as well as the artist’s personal experiences. Leonardo da Vinci’s The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and Saint John the Baptist was an important source of inspiration for the artist. Her parents had a reproduction of Da Vinci’s drawing in their home, which Saville viewed as a kind of permanence. GAY: Absolutely. Ten years ago, I collected data and found that nearly 90 percent of the books reviewed in the New York Times are by white authors. It’s so important to have hard numbers, because so many naysayers will only believe data. But we can’t just look at the data and say, oh, that’s terrible. Publishers need to respond—not just with editorial fellowships, but with permanent changes. Until they do, we’re going to continue to have these conversations. Diversity and inclusion are not my areas of expertise, but I’m forced to do this type of work because these egregious disparities continue to exist. Jenny Saville was born in Cambridge on the 7th of May, 1970, to parents working in education. As a child, Saville moved to several different schools, following her father’s dynamic career as a school administrator. Saville was interested in art from the age of eight and her parents encouraged her to pursue independent work. In 1997, Saville’s work was again showcased in an important exhibition, titled Sensation, hosted by the Royal Academy of Art in London. This exhibition traveled in 1999 to the Brooklyn Museum, where it was received with much controversy. Jenny Saville was soon considered an important artist as part of the “Young British Artists”. This group of artists included Damien Hirst, Rachel Whiteread, and Tracey Emin, and their work was mostly conceptual in nature.

Jenny Saville’s Depictions of Surgery and Images from Medical Books Cindy by Jenny Saville, 1993, via Christie’s SAVILLE: Ruth Bader Ginsburg talked about how the gates will open to allow more people to get through. I feel that, and so do you. But I often wonder, when exactly will the gates open? HB, 310 x 240 mm, 304 p, 152 Kleurenillustraties, ENG edition, Publication date: Juni 23. ISBN 9788836650835. 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. Saville transcends the limits between figurative and abstract, between informal and gestural, managing to transfigure the news into a universal image, which puts the human figure at the center of the history of art. Huge, naked bodies, with a carnal physicality and oppressed by a weight that is more existential than material, Seville 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. Her work also outlines a strong correlation with the masters of the Italian Renaissance, in particular with some of Michelangelo's great masterpieces. The volume contains a rich catalogue of paintings and drawings from the 1990s to today. 0 g. SAVILLE: You’ve got this amazing confidence, and I’m wondering, does it come from your willingness to reveal vulnerabilities? For me, I’m very conscious that I’m going to die one day, which makes staying brutally, viscerally true seem urgent and worthwhile. At her core, Jenny Saville is a painter’s painter. Although Saville showcased her work frequently in both the UK and in America, she decided to buy an apartment in Palermo, Italy. She said that she fell in love with the city and her new apartment was also home to her new studio space.

Human perception of the body is so acute and knowledgeable that the smallest hint of a body can trigger recognition. GAY: That makes sense. I certainly have other forms of criticism in my life: editors and trusted readers. 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.

ROXANE GAY: I first saw your work at the Broad Museum. I was just walking around, then I looked up, and I saw this huge triptych [ Strategy, 1994] that shows a fat woman—a woman with her breasts sagging, with stomach rolls. It was the first time I’d ever seen a body that looks like mine in an artwork, and it was incredible. I became obsessed. In most art, when a woman is fat, she’s not actually that fat—she’s just sort of plump. She doesn’t have any rolls or wrinkles or stretch marks. And here I saw fat bodies, unadorned and unapologetic. It was really surprising. We know that representation matters, but when you see the kind of representation you didn’t even know you wanted, it can be really meaningful. But Saville’s work is not explicitly Christian: It is not about Jesus. Her work is about the figure. These paintings are about how one human form relates to another. How the flesh of a child relates to that of his mother. And I think she gets it. Better yet, she helps me to understand it.There are several important Jenny Saville drawings and paintings that can be discussed as seminal works by the artist. Saville understands and manipulates paint in a way which describes flesh in a visceral and tangible way yet managing to retaining the materiality of the medium. However she remains focussed on the intention to represent driven by her internal reference to subject matter through paint. Jenny Saville: “I have to really work at the tension between getting the paint to have the sensory quality that I want and be constructive in terms of building the form of a stomach, for example, or creating the inner crevice of a thigh. The more I do it, the more the space between abstraction and figuration becomes interesting. I want a painting realism. (Schama, n.d.) Jenny Saville’s works have often been described as important examples of feminist art. Even though Saville herself claimed to be more interested in bodies in general than specifically female bodies, her work is still greatly influenced by feminist theories and writers, like the écriture feminine , the philosopher Julia Kristeva, and Luce Irigaray. Écriture feminine, which can be translated with “women’s writing” aimed for a way of writing that offers a new approach from a feminine perspective and that does not align with the predominant masculine and patriarchal literary tradition. The philosophers Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray contributed to the écriture feminine. Saville said in an interview “ I was trying to attempt to paint the female and they were attempting to write the female.”