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New Statesman
02-07-2025
- 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
South China Morning Post
02-06-2025
- Entertainment
- South China Morning Post
Cognac char siu? Cheese spring rolls? Samuel Lee Sum uses Paris restaurant ‘to experiment'
After 10 years as head chef of Shang Palace, the fine-dining Chinese restaurant at the Shangri-La Paris hotel, Samuel Lee Sum felt it was time to open his own restaurant in the City of Lights. Advertisement Opened in mid-February, Sensation not only refers to the five senses, but also incorporates Lee's Chinese given name in Mandarin, sen, meaning forest. Having his name on the door motivates him to work hard to succeed, he says, adding that he likes a challenge. 'Sensation is a bistronomique (a casual fine-dining restaurant), a laid-back place where you can have food paired with wine,' Lee says. 'You don't need to wear a suit to come here and eat good Chinese food.' Sensation's Cantonese char siu marinated and basted in a cognac sauce. Photo: Sensation The menu features intriguing dishes such as Chaozhou (Chiu Chow) marinated oyster, spring rolls with Comte cheese, and char siu marinated in cognac. The 43-year-old chef says he uses traditional Chinese cooking techniques with ingredients the French are familiar with. Advertisement 'French diners know raw oysters, but they may not have tried the Chiu Chow marinated sauce with garlic, chillies, cilantro and sesame oil,' he says. 'When they eat it they can taste the sweetness [of the seafood].'
Rakyat Post
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Rakyat Post
Back In The 80s, This Malaysian Singer Went International With Her NZ Band
Subscribe to our FREE Many Malaysians know Malaysia's indie queen-turned-international music star Yunalis Mat Zara'ai, better known by her stage name Yuna. She set a new bar for female artists here when she signed with a US-based record label which catapulted her career to new heights, even clinching collaborations with other big names in music such as Usher and Jhene Aiko. Today, Yuna has earned a multitude of accolades for her talents and success. But, she wasn't the first female artist from here to be recognised by the west. There was another female artist before Yuna who made it big in New Zealand, America, and the world There's always an otai to another otai (an older, more experienced person), and to most Malaysians who were teens in the early 2000s, they might see Yuna as the OG female musician from Malaysia breaking out into the western market. However, those who were going through their puberty in the late 80s and early 90s will remember a singer who dropped toe-tapping pop tunes such as Sensation and Paradise . Datuk Wan Aishah Wan Ariffin, otherwise known as Aishah, was the lead vocalist of The Fan Club, a band that came out of New Zealand in the late 1980s. Aishah was studying in New Zealand at the time when she was spotted by some of the band members, who asked her to join them. In 1988, the band released Sensation, their first album. Three songs from the album became top 20 singles in the New Zealand and Malaysian charts at the time. The hit songs were Sensation, Paradise, and Call Me. By 1990, The Fan Club's songs had received significant airplay on major US Top 40 stations. In recognition of their success, the band was awarded International Artist of the Year at the 1991 New Zealand Music Awards. The Fan Club's guitarist settled down in Malaysia, and is still here today The band broke up in 1993 and Aishah continued a solo music career, while the rest of the band returned to New Zealand except for the band's guitarist, who some of you might be familiar with. Paul Raymond Moss, or Paul Moss, returned to Malaysia in 1995 and formed a music company called Positive Tone under the EMI record label together with Malaysian film and music producer Datuk Izham Omar (the current CEO of television channel 8TV). At Positive Tone, he has produced a number of gold and platinum releases as well as Anugerah Industri Muzik (AIM) winners with local groups such as OAG and Innuendo. For those of you who followed the popular talent programme Malaysian Idol closely, you'll remember Moss as one of the judges alongside music producer Roslan Abdul Aziz and veteran singer Fauziah Latiff. Moss went on to become media network giant Media Prima's media portals general manager. Moss usually expressed his opinions on Malaysian Idol harshly, and has been compared to American Idol judge Simon Cowell on occasions. Share your thoughts with us via TRP's . Get more stories like this to your inbox by signing up for our newsletter.
