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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


Times
18-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
Jenny Saville at the National Portrait Gallery review — a must-see tribute
J enny Saville arrived in art with the loudest splash I can remember. One moment she was invisible, the next she was unmissable: a huge talent, painting huge pictures, of a huge subject, in a hugely different manner. Everyone noticed her. This was early in the 1990s and chiefly the handiwork of Charles Saatchi, the most impactful collector Britain has probably produced. Saatchi changed art. He spotted young talents, supported them and displayed them. He was the reason the YBAs happened. He unleashed Saville on us when she was barely out of art school. Her debut at Saatchi's Boundary Road gallery was seismic. It was as if three genres of art — the nude, the self-portrait, the symbolic female monument — were being reinvented by a student from the Glasgow School of Art. She was only 22. Yet here she was taking on swathes of art history with feminist ferocity and doing it brilliantly. The dollops of Rembrantian self-doubt she added to the recipe served to enlarge its impact. Wow.


South China Morning Post
04-06-2025
- Entertainment
- South China Morning Post
Summer 2025 exhibitions: Rick Owens' unforgettable aesthetic, Jenny Saville's striking self-portraits, a focus on the history of kimonos, and Wolfgang Tillmans asks: are we prepared?
Rick Owens, Temple of Love Rick Owens' autumn/winter 2023 Luxor runway, one of the designer's unforgettable shows at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. Photo: Handout American designer Rick Owens , who has called Paris home since 2003, is the subject and artistic director of an exhibition at Palais Galliera museum. Since moving to the French capital, the Los Angeles-born designer, who established his eponymous label in 1992, has been wowing his devoted fans with unforgettable shows, most of them held at the nearby Palais de Tokyo. The exhibition, titled 'Rick Owens, Temple of Love', will display more than 100 outfits, and also features Owens' personal archives, videos, art installations, and pieces from artists like Joseph Beuys and Steven Parrino. From June 28, 2025, to January 4, 2026. Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting Jenny Saville took the art world by storm in the 1990s with paintings such as Propped (1992), which features in the current retrospective of her work. Photo: Gagosian Advertisement Jenny Saville rose to prominence in the 90s as one of the original Young British Artists (YBAs), who took the art world by storm with their often controversial work. Known for her large-scale figurative paintings, Saville had her first break with her graduation show at the Glasgow School of Art. 'Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting', an exhibition at London's National Portrait Gallery, brings together more than 50 of her works, from oil paintings to charcoal drawings. From June 20 to September 7. Kimono A calendar by Yoshu Chikanobu (1910) is part of the exhibition 'Kimono' at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, Australia. Photo: Handout The word 'kimono' means 'thing to wear' in Japanese, which is no surprise, since until relatively recently the wrapped-front garment was the most common form of clothing in Japan. Normally made from silk and embroidered with motifs such as flowers and birds, the kimono can be considered a piece of art, as the exhibition 'Kimono', at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, demonstrates. Comprising more than 70 pieces, the show also features creations from fashion designers such as Yohji Yamamoto, Issey Miyake Alexander McQueen and John Galliano. From June 4 to October 5. Wolfgang Tillmans: Rien Ne Nous y Préparait – Tout Nous y Préparait Echo Beach (2017) from the exhibition 'Wolfgang Tillmans: Rien Ne Nous y Préparait – Tout Nous y Préparait', showing at the Centre Pompidou, Paris. Photo: Handout Later this year, the Centre Pompidou, one of Paris' most visited museums and one of its most striking architectural landmarks, will close for an extensive renovation expected to last until 2030. Before the temporary closure, the museum will host an exhibition in collaboration with German artist Wolfgang Tillmans, who was given carte blanche to reimagine the second floor of the museum's library. From photographs to videos, music and text, Tillmans' oeuvre will interact with the space envisioned by legendary architects Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers. Not much else is yet known about the show, titled 'Wolfgang Tillmans: Rien Ne Nous y Préparait – Tout Nous y Préparait' (Nothing Could Have Prepared Us – Everything Could Have Prepared Us). From June 13 to September 22.


Times
18-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
Seeing Each Other review — Freud, Bacon, Emin and Kahlo all join the party
Looking is what artists do. But at what? At each other, endlessly, on the evidence of this new exhibition at Pallant House Gallery in Chichester, which looks back over 125 years at the ways that artists working in Britain have portrayed each other. It takes a broadly chronological approach to pick out specific relationships, friendships and social circles (the Slade School, which admitted women from its founding in 1868, mid-century Cornwall, the pop art scene and the YBAs are particularly rich veins) to reveal webs of connection — some more tangled than others — and to show how artists have used portrayals of their peers and heroes to pay homage. The first image, at the entrance, is a WANTED poster. Created in 2001 by


The Guardian
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Body of work: the transgressive art of Helen Chadwick
Helen Chadwick, who died unexpectedly in 1996 at the age of 42, has long been an artist more name-checked than exhibited. Her devotees include the lauded feminist mythographer Marina Warner, for whom she's 'one of contemporary art's most provocative and profound figures'. Yet she is habitually relegated to a footnote within British art: one of the first women to be nominated for the Turner prize in 1987 and an outstanding teacher of YBAs such as Sarah Lucas, Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst. She remains best known for Piss Flowers, her white bronze sculptures whose stalagmite protuberances are phallic inversions of vaginal recesses, cast from the holes she and her husband made by peeing in thick snow. (The artist's hotter urine went deeper, creating larger cavities. She described the work as 'a penis-envy farce'.) It's easy to see how her transgressive interests might have quickened British art's pulse. Yet her meditations on the sacred and profane, sex and death, were expansive, propelling diverse experiments across installation, photography and performance. Now, her prolific if all too short career is getting its first major showing in more than two decades. At a time when gender binaries are being dismantled, Laura Smith, curator of a retrospective at the Hepworth Wakefield, Helen Chadwick: Life Pleasures, and editor of the accompanying book, hopes to make Chadwick's relevance to a fresh generation clear. 'She was trying to disrupt societal conventions, including gender normativity,' Smith says. 'She was really pioneering and she wasn't afraid of art being sexy or funny, either.' The exhibition opens with the decidedly fluid Cacao, one of Chadwick's most affecting evocations of how opposites such as desire and abjection entwine. It's a huge chocolate fountain set to be filled with 800kg of Tony's Chocolonely, which will gush from a central liquid erection. Needless to say, this brown pool evokes more than confectionery. 'It's joyous and kind of gross,' says Smith. 'It bubbles like a swamp. Basically, it farts.' Chadwick was also an inveterate craftsperson. The images of her MA graduation show of 1977, In the Kitchen, where she's encased in sculptural costumes of white goods, are often used to represent feminist art of that decade. What the pictures can't tell you is what went into those creations, including performances with wearable beds and latex nudity suits cast from their wearers' bodies. According to Errin Hussey, who's overseeing an exhibition in Leeds of her archive, 'the costumes really show the dedication she had. The intricacy of detail and planning that went into the textile and metalwork on just one shoe is amazing.' For her first major work, Ego Geometria Sum, she devised a novel way to embed shots of herself on to the plywood surfaces of sculptures by painting them with photographic emulsion. The Oval Court, part of the exhibition that led to her Turner nomination, took the experimentation further. She created its dreamy blue-and-white collage with a photocopier, making direct images of her own body alongside an apparent cornucopia of flowers, fruit and dead animals including lambs and a swan. Complementing this lusciously libidinal work is Carcass, a glass tower that, when originally shown at the ICA in 1986, was filled with dead animals' bodies, plus weeks of kitchen waste. When the gases generated by its live decomposition caused its glass to crack, and the gallery attempted to remove it, the lid blew off, spraying rot across the art space. (At the Hepworth, its vegetarian recreation features a gas valve so it can be 'burped like a baby' each night.) In what would be her final decade, frustrated by the heat she was getting from fellow feminists about her use of nudity, she abandoned depicting her outer body and looked within instead. Moving on from questions around objectified gender towards a polymorphous, fluid sexuality, in these works things are forever collapsing into their opposite, like Piss Flowers' erect recesses. As Smith reflects: 'In her thinking nothing was black and white.' Viral Landscapes, 1988-89In this work created after Chadwick stopped depicting her outer body, photography of Pembrokeshire's coast is overlain with images of cells taken from her urine, blood, cervix, mouth and ear. In the Kitchen, 1977 (main image)Chadwick's earliest works hinged on feminist concerns about constructed identity. For her MA degree show she and her performers donned sculptural costumes of white goods and made a tongue-in-cheek speech about 'kitchen lib' to a soundtrack of clips from daytime radio aimed at housewives. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion Piss Flowers, 1991-92Chadwick's Piss Flowers first made a scatalogical twosome with her chocolate fountain sculpture Cacao at her exhibition Effluvia at the Serpentine Gallery in London in 1994. The press had a field day but the show attracted record numbers to the venue: 54,000 visitors in six weeks. The Oval Court, 1984-86In this sculptural installation featuring collage on a large, low platform, the artist created a vision of baroque excess using blue-and-white images of her own body, flora and fauna made with a photocopying machine. Unlike the finger-wagging Vanitas paintings Chadwick drew on, its vision of life's transient pleasures mixed with death has a luxuriant, unbridled energy. Loop My Loop, 1991Chadwick had a genius for evoking the slippage between desire and disgust. Here, she entwines the age-old lover's keepsake, a lock of golden hair, with pig intestines. Airy romance meets bodily urges; the human entwines with the animal. Where does one begin and the other end? Helen Chadwick: Life Pleasures is at Hepworth Wakefield, 17 May to 27 October; the book of the same name is published by Thames & Hudson (£30); Helen Chadwick: Artist, Researcher, Archivist is at Leeds Art Gallery to 4 November.