Latest news with #JennySaville
The Guardian
09-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Ed Sheeran's Pollock homage has energy but no feeling or truth
One thing is obvious about Ed Sheeran the painter: he doesn't want to ruin his clothes. He paints in a white protective suit, photos reveal, as if paint was radioactive material or sewage. It's a telling contrast with a real artist like Jenny Saville, who gets completely covered with paint like a naughty three-year-old, let alone Van Gogh, who ate the stuff. Sheeran isn't claiming to be one of those artists – is he? He's in it for fun and charity. And his paintings have more energy than you'd think from the prissy hazmat suit. He must have moved about a bit, flicking and pouring the fizzy greenish blues, hot orange, lime, mixing them as if making cocktails. But there's a problem. While he has successfully defeated plagiarism claims regarding his songs, he would have no defence from the Jackson Pollock estate. His art is, let's be polite, one big homage to the abstract expressionist painter who turned modern art on its head, showing that the body could see more than the mind with his hurled lines of flowing, tangled colours created in dance-like moves around horizontal canvases. Sheeran is right to love Pollock. But it's cocksure and stupid to think you can reproduce his genius on your days off because, you know, it looks pretty easy. It wasn't. This is where celebrity artists get it wrong: they think art is fun but art is suffering and madness. A Sheeran splash may ape a Pollock splash but there's no feeling, no truth. Pollock put his inside self on canvas, luring you into a web of mental suffering and triumph. Abstract art like Sheeran's gives all abstract art a bad name because it's based on the dumb idea that doing your own is a breeze. I have more respect for Ronnie Wood and Bob Dylan who attempt figurative paintings: you can mock but at least they take a risk in doing the kind of art people are quick to judge. Sheeran's art is a slick con job. In painting his light, meaningless abstract concoctions, he avoids proper scrutiny and dips a toe into art without putting himself on the line. What a pro, even when he is an amateur.
The Guardian
09-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Ed Sheeran's Pollock homage has energy but no feeling or truth
One thing is obvious about Ed Sheeran the painter: he doesn't want to ruin his clothes. He paints in a white protective suit, photos reveal, as if paint was radioactive material or sewage. It's a telling contrast with a real artist like Jenny Saville, who gets completely covered with paint like a naughty three-year-old, let alone Van Gogh, who ate the stuff. Sheeran isn't claiming to be one of those artists – is he? He's in it for fun and charity. And his paintings have more energy than you'd think from the prissy hazmat suit. He must have moved about a bit, flicking and pouring the fizzy greenish blues, hot orange, lime, mixing them as if making cocktails. But there's a problem. While he has successfully defeated plagiarism claims regarding his songs, he would have no defence from the Jackson Pollock estate. His art is, let's be polite, one big homage to the abstract expressionist painter who turned modern art on its head, showing that the body could see more than the mind with his hurled lines of flowing, tangled colours created in dance-like moves around horizontal canvases. Sheeran is right to love Pollock. But it's cocksure and stupid to think you can reproduce his genius on your days off because, you know, it looks pretty easy. It wasn't. This is where celebrity artists get it wrong: they think art is fun but art is suffering and madness. A Sheeran splash may ape a Pollock splash but there's no feeling, no truth. Pollock put his inside self on canvas, luring you into a web of mental suffering and triumph. Abstract art like Sheeran's gives all abstract art a bad name because it's based on the dumb idea that doing your own is a breeze. I have more respect for Ronnie Wood and Bob Dylan who attempt figurative paintings: you can mock but at least they take a risk in doing the kind of art people are quick to judge. Sheeran's art is a slick con job. In painting his light, meaningless abstract concoctions, he avoids proper scrutiny and dips a toe into art without putting himself on the line. What a pro, even when he is an amateur.
The Guardian
30-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘So much emotion in a single image': I join a schoolclass admiring Jenny Saville's astonishing new portraits
I went to see Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting at the National Portrait Gallery recently and the exhibition was swarming with teenagers. Equipped with notepads and sketchbooks, scribbling down words like 'expressive', 'daring' and 'beautiful', the budding art enthusiasts seemed enraptured by Saville's portraits: from blemished backs and wounded faces to colossal closeups of girls and fleshy nude women. I got talking to an art teacher and her sixth formers and we discussed how Saville's bodies are the antithesis to the idealised forms we see online today; and how stunned we were by the landscape of textures that can exist within a single cheek. Seventeen-year-old Laurence – who makes drawings with a ballpoint pen – admired the 'messy side' to Saville's work and was fascinated by 'just how much emotion she could portray in one image'. His classmate Georgia, also 17, was drawn to her 'vibrant colours' and felt 'positively overwhelmed' by the paintings, in particular Propped, an exposing early self-portrait that was part of the artist's Glasgow School of Art degree show. Fusing beauty and brutality, a softness and sharpness, a nude Saville sits on a precarious-looking stool (spikily jamming into her ankle), with bitten-down nails that violently claw into her skin. Look closer and you'll see the painting is overlaid with text (written backwards) that reads: 'if we continue to speak in this sameness – speak as men have spoken for centuries, we will fail each other'. It's a translation from the French feminist Luce Irigaray's 1980 essay When Our Lips Speak Together, and draws not only on the importance of art history not repeating itself (by excluding voices and subjects), but – more powerfully today – about the failings of current leaders. 'It's really inspiring for young women in art to be controversial,' Georgia said. 'It also makes you more confident in your ability and appearance, because you see Saville create it in a beautiful painting.' Frustrated at how 'inaccessible' being an artist has been for women in history, and questioning why men get to be covered up with a fig leaf, whereas women are often fully exposed, she said: 'When [a self-portrait like this] is done by a woman, it's empowering in itself – it's women taking back control.' Georgia's words took me back to my own experiences as a teenager with Saville, who I studied as part of my GCSEs in the early 2010s. I remember my classmates and I coming into school with printouts of our faces pressed up against glass windows (no doubt reluctantly taken by our mums) that distorted our features like Saville's 2002 Closed Contact self-portraits, made with photographer Glen Luchford. Full of expression, and evocative of our teenage angst, the works got us thinking about how portraiture, like our lives, could be messy, fractured, emotional, internal – seemingly worlds away from the gilt-framed pictures that we often saw in museums, or the airbrushed photoshoots in magazines. But only now, at this show, have I been able to understand the monumental impact of her paintings. Not only in challenging notions of beauty in a patriarchal world, but in her ambition to push paint – and charcoal, in her mesmerising drawings – to new limits, in order to viscerally confront, stun and challenge. Whether it be a bloodied face examined under a bright white light, bodies fading from life right in front of us, or her truthful insights on motherhood, Saville's works hold the attention in ways that affirm the power of painting in a world overtaken by mindless scrolling. It was this that I also discussed with the teenagers, whose astute observations made me feel so encouraged about what art can offer us, in this tumultuous world. But these precious youthful discussions could become a rarity, thanks to ever decreasing government funding in arts education. As outlined in the recent spending review, the total expenditure of Department for Culture, Media and Sport will be reduced by 1.4% over the next three years, and research shows that only 38% of A-level students are taking at least one humanities subject (a statistic that drops to 24% when it comes to arts subjects). As a result, we are experiencing a crisis when it comes to lack of opportunities for creatives from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. Incredibly, Saville's exhibition is free for anyone aged 25 and under, thanks to a private donor. I hope this will encourage young people of all backgrounds to enter these spaces and feel welcome to discuss, debate and come back again – and to understand the raw, visceral power that painting and the arts can have.
The Guardian
20-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
From Jenny Saville's gobsmacking show to a pomo celebration of Richard Rogers – the week in art
Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of PaintingA hugely impressive display of skill and imagination that proves Saville a tremendous painter of beauty, terror and everything in between. Read the review. National Portrait Gallery, London, until 7 September Abstract EroticHow Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse and Alice Adams subverted the formal chill of 1960s minimalism with witty intrusions of desire. The Courtauld, London, until 14 September Watteau Subtle drawings by this wonderfully tender, sensual visionary of the rococo age. British Museum, London, until 14 September Richard RogersThe postmodern British architect is celebrated in the home of pre-modern architectural genius John Soane. Sir John Soane's Museum, London, until 21 September Daphne WrightIrish artist Wright has created new sculptures in direct response to the Ashmolean Museum's collection. Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, until 8 February This is Samson and Delilah by Peter Paul Rubens. Or is it? Some commentators, such as art historian Euphrosyne Doxiadis, claim the National Gallery's oil painting is a fake, calling it 'a shoddy artefact, lacking the brilliance of my favourite European painter'. Our critic contends that the painting doesn't look typical of Rubens for good reason: it is his passionate attempt to paint like someone else. William Kentridge's vast sculptures are landing in Yorkshire The crystal-covered artwork Van Gogh's Chair couldn't support the weight of one tourist Photographer Taryn Simon captured the cat that made Trump a laughing stock Daredevil motorcyclists and Italian bloodletting rituals are in contention for this year's Jarman award Elizabeth Peyton's portrait of the Gallagher brothers is expected to reach £1.5m at auction Christelle Oyiri gave herself horns and a tail for her plastic surgery inspired selfie sculptures Sign up to Art Weekly Your weekly art world round-up, sketching out all the biggest stories, scandals and exhibitions after newsletter promotion Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral has been given Grade I-listed building status A new show at the Getty Center in LA showcases 100 years of queer art, including a $3 bill The Virgin Suckling the Infant Christ, about 1565-1575, by Titian There is a simple heartfelt humanity to this painting of a mother breastfeeding her child that is typical of Titian, whose images of women range from unabashed nudes to intimate portraits yet are always loving, one way or another. By the time he painted this, in the final decade of his long life, he had seen and painted so much. He throws away big ambitions, watches this tender moment between mother and baby, and paints with soft, expressive reverence. Yet there's another side to it: the composition echoes his rival Michelangelo, who had recently died. For decades these last surviving giants of the high Renaissance had looked at and tried to outdo one another, but here, perhaps, Titian pays tribute to Michelangelo as he breathes a prayer for them both. National Gallery, London If you don't already receive our regular roundup of art and design news via email, please sign up here. If you have any questions or comments about any of our newsletters please email newsletters@
Telegraph
19-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
If you see one art show this summer, see this
I believe that Jenny Saville is a genius. Of the 45 works in The Anatomy of Painting, her stunning retrospective at the National Portrait Gallery – maybe the show of the summer – at least a dozen bear that out. Spanning her career from the early 1990s to the present day, the exhibition testifies to a virtuoso's flair. Saville handles form and colour with ease, and brings her subjects to glowing, shifting life. This is portrait painting as electricity. Saville was born in Cambridge in 1970. Her work was spotted by Charles Saatchi in 1992 at a graduation show; he bought her entire collection on the spot. The picture that brought her into the public eye, Propped (1992), faces you as you enter the halls of the NPG. Restlessness jockeys with poise: a large naked woman perches on a skinny pedestal, her head tilted back in the enigmatic expression that would become a Saville favourite. (It's partly a self-portrait, but as with most of her work, there's as much imagination as representation here.) The picture had its critics – fleshy and combative, it wasn't the kind of nude they liked – but 30 years on, it remains a thrill. Saville 's women, especially those from the 1990s, might seem cousins to Lucian Freud's, but she owes more to Willem de Kooning and his angular female forms. 'Flesh,' he once remarked, 'was the reason why oil painting was invented.' Saville saw the Dutch-American's art when she was a student, and has recalled being thunderstruck: 'The paint was right on the surface.' Her work has, ever since, been all on the surface too; perhaps that's true of any painting, but most don't insist so hard on the fact, don't hover so skilfully in our eyeline between nature and artifice – between the picture as a portrait of life and as a mere collection of painted marks. As Saville's career, and the NPG show, reach the early 2000s, we meet a series of giant faces. All are masterfully coloured, yet in different palettes; built around direct gazes, yet in different moods. They conjure intense emotion, but never straightforwardly. I loved Bleach (2008), in which a young woman's head is built up through rippling off-white hues; and Stare (2004-5), used on a Manic Street Preachers album cover, its little boy a landscape of deep red strokes and swells. These faces coalesce, decompose, come together again: you see the pictures themselves as living things. Towards the present, Saville's portraits become glassier, weirder. Chasah (2020) and Prism (2020) combine smooth tones on the skin with zippy squiggles of abstract form. And then you turn, and see the knockout: Rupture (2020), one of the great paintings of our age. A woman's head rises, with eerie serenity, from a spectrum of buzzing colour: yellow glows through her cheeks, her neck boils away into green. One eye appears thin and translucent, while the other has human depth, even tenderness. I began by calling Saville a genius: if you doubt me, go to the NPG and seek out Rupture. What you'll see in those eyes is something else.
