Jenny Saville

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GAY: Hearing about the conditions under which some people create art is truly eye opening. It always makes me realize that, as underappreciated as the arts may be in the Western world, we at least have the freedom to make it. NCOn Picasso and Cubism, there’s also his incredible, very late self-portrait from 1972, the year before he died. As opposed to the evolving image which an intuitive painter may develop erasing and sacrificing throughout responding to the materiality of the medium. 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.

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. 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.Image:Gagosian, 2003. Jenny Saville – Reverse. [image] Available at: [Accessed 18 May 2020]. GAY: That’s a good question. The gates are opening in the writing world a little bit, but they’re not opening as widely as people like to believe. An article in the New York Times showed that between 1950 and 2018, only 5 percent of all published fiction was written by people of color. I really thought we’d been making more progress than that. At the same time, there are a lot of white writers who sincerely believe, “I’m white, so there is no way my book is going to get published,” even though white people comprise 95 percent of the publishing world. 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.”

The presentation of Jenny Saville’s work is supported by the Jenny Saville Exhibition Circle - our thanks to: Gagosian; George Economou; the Amoli Foundation, Hong Kong; The Broad Art Foundation; Modern Forms and other donors who wish to remain anonymous.Alongside the work of Jenny Saville will be new and recent works by five artists who have explored ideas related to the body, performance, process and materials. This Jenny Saville self-portrait is considered one of the most important paintings created by a British artist in the last 30 years. In this painting, Saville portrays herself in a way that challenges the male gaze and breaks down traditional representations of the female nude. This monumental painting shows the artist sitting down in the nude, balancing on a kind pedestal, and staring down at the viewer.

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. 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. 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. NCWhen you talk about someone like Degas, you think of something “pretty.” And that’s the association with pastels—the colors are kind of muted and delicate. But the way you use them, there’s a kind of toughness, almost an ugliness. I mean that in a good way, like there’s a brutality.

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”.