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New Statesman
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- New Statesman
Jenny Saville's human landscapes
Such was the noise generated by a cluster of exhibits at Sensation – the 1997 show at the Royal Academy that announced the Young British Artists to a fascinated-appalled public – that it is easy to forget that there were more than 40 artists on display. Hirst, Emin, the Chapman brothers, Marc Quinn's self-portrait head made from his own blood, Chris Ofili's elephant-dung Virgin and Marcus Harvey's portrait of Myra Hindley simply drowned out many less strident voices. One of those belonged to Jenny Saville, who had five pieces in the show. However, while many of her fellow YBAs have, since that high-water mark, seen a steep downwards trajectory in terms of creativity (though not necessarily fame) Saville's career has followed the opposite path. In 2018, when her painting Propped (1992) – a massively fleshy naked self-portrait showing a ham-thighed Saville on a stool (in reality, she is not a large woman) – sold at Sotheby's for £9.5m, it became the world's most expensive piece by living female artist. And this time it seemed that the market was acting not on whim or media wattage, but on worth. Propped is one of the paintings included in the National Portrait Gallery's new survey of Saville's work. It is an appropriate venue because all her work is a form of portraiture although not of the conventional kind. She prefers to work from photographs rather than the live model and when she draws and paints faces she gives them titles that anonymise the sitter further, such as Stare, Witness or Figure 11.23; when she paints the naked body they are named Odalisque or Couples Study; when it is simply headless but stretched or pitted flesh it becomes Trace or Hybrid. All, however, show real people – or bits of them – but rather than read their personality through their gaze, clothing or setting, Saville writes it in their skin. The abstract expressionist painter Willem de Kooning, an artist Saville greatly admires, wrote in 1949 that 'flesh was the reason why oil paint was invented', and it is a dictum she has taken to heart. Her pictures are about both elements – flesh and paint – and her interest is rarely in the conventionally beautiful but rather in human mass and how best to depict it. For clues she has looked not just at De Kooning but at Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, Titian and Chaim Soutine, scoured medical textbooks and observed in operating theatres. However, the artist she most resembles in many ways is a less hallowed name, Henry Tonks, the First World War surgeon who produced numerous pastel drawings of soldiers following rudimentary reconstructive surgery. In Saville, as in Tonks, the surface of the skin and the subcutaneous layers are intertwined. Saville has expressed an interest in bodies 'that emanate a sort of state of in-betweenness', such as in her paintings from the 1990s of bodies with marks drawn on them by a surgeon as a guide to operating, or a hefty back and bottom bearing the impress of recently removed bra straps, waistband and knickers. As she told an interviewer about her fascination with imperfect flesh: 'As we go through life, traces or memories both physical and psychological are left on the body; they almost help to produce your body.' This kind of scrutiny makes her a non-judgemental observer. She has also followed Mark Rothko in stating that her pictures should be viewed from a distance of 18 inches. While with Rothko this fills the viewer's field of vision with colour that begins to throb after a few moments, with Saville, a painter who more often than not works at a large scale, it means submersion in flesh. It is rarely a comfortable experience but Saville's particular gift is to make sure it is not a repellent one. One and a half feet is too close perhaps but it forces the viewer to confront the abstract nature not just of her paint but of flesh itself. From her early paintings to her more recent huge and vibrantly coloured heads, Saville treats the body as a form of landscape. Limbs are less objects for propulsion or lifting than elements of corporeal scenery, offering valleys and crests, enclosures and vistas. In some of her head paintings from 2020, such as Cascade and Virtual, she emphasises this non-figurative strand. Like Georg Baselitz's work, they are painted upside down and the controlled marks of her early work have here turned riotous – slashes and rubbings of roughly mixed pigments surrounding disembodied eyes. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe The sense of the body as something liminal is most evident in her mother and child pictures which she started to paint following the birth of her own two children in the late 2000s. Although they clearly refer to innumerable depictions of the Madonna and Child, Saville's contain an element of struggle – the naked mother (herself in several) trying to hold on to a wriggling child. The squirming infants are engaged in a battle not to cling on their mother but to escape from her; having been born, they fast-forward to separation. Poignantly, in Aleppo (2017-18), her response to the war in Syria, that struggle has ended prematurely in death. The mother and child has become a pietà. In this picture, as in many, she leaves the drawn outlines of rejected poses, the preparatory studies familiar from Renaissance cartoons. The reason for these pentimenti, she says, is that she is 'trying to get simultaneous realities to exist in the same image'. They don't always work: for example, One Out of Two (Symposium) (2016), a monochrome, Freud-like drawing of naked women on a bed, is overlaid with terracotta swirls that neither enhance the drawing beneath nor indeed refer to it, but are simply a wilful addition, as though Saville felt the picture needed something – more energy? more diversion? – but couldn't quite decide on exactly what. Right from the start of Saville's career, there has been much talk – some by the artist herself – of her work being a response to the old debates about naked vs nude, objectification and reclaiming women's bodies. This retrospective, however, suggests something simpler. She is interested above all in the act of painting and how 'to charge the paint with a sculptural force'; it is why she treats the human body as a canvas as much as a subject. Sometimes, when artists make frequent references to the art-historical canon, it is little more than an impertinence. But not with Saville, who has taken a venerable tradition and moved it on. She is a painter of substance. Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting The National Portrait Gallery, London WC2. Until 7 September [See more: Anna Wintour still rules Vogue] Related
The Citizen
19-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Citizen
SA-born Marlene Dumas breaks global record with R245 million painting sale
Warning: Artistic Nudity — This article includes artwork containing nudity. Viewer discretion is advised. South African-born artist Marlene Dumas has shattered a global auction record after her 1997 painting Miss January sold for a jaw-dropping $13.6 million — more than R245 million. The sale took place at a Christie's auction held at the Rockefeller Centre in New York, with the event also streamed live on Instagram and YouTube. Dumas' painting currently holds the record for the most expensive painting ever sold by a living woman artist. She surpassed the previous record held by British painter Jenny Saville, whose 1992 work Propped sold for £9.5 million (R228 million) at Sotheby's in London in 2018. However, while Miss January sets a new benchmark for living female artists, Dumas still trails behind top-selling male artists like Jeff Koons, whose sculpture Rabbit (1986) sold for a staggering $91.07 million (R1.65 billion) in 2019. ALSO READ: April art auction: Expressions of labour, form Marlene Dumas' 'magnum opus' Christie's Deputy Chairman of Post-War and Contemporary Art, Sara Friedlander, described Miss January as Dumas' 'magnum opus'. 'In this painting, Dumas triumphantly demonstrates a formal mastery of the woman's body while simultaneously freeing it from a tradition of subjection, upending normalised concepts of the female nude through the lens of a male-centric history,' Friedlander said in a post-auction statement. Born in Cape Town in 1953, Dumas has lived in Amsterdam since 1976 and continues to exhibit her work at the Galleria Paul Andriesse, where she debuted in 1977. She represented the Netherlands at the 1995 Venice Biennale and was featured in the central exhibition space of the Biennale again in 2015. Her long list of accolades includes the Düsseldorf Art Prize (2007), the Rolf Schock Prize in Visual Arts (2011), the Johannes Vermeer Award (2012), and the Hans Theo Richter Prize for Drawing and Graphic Art (2017). NOW READ: Here's why investing in rare whisky can be profitable
