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Jenny Saville & Glen Luchford

Closed Contact

January 12–February 9, 2002
Beverly Hills

Jenny Saville & Glen Luchford: Closed Contact Installation view

Jenny Saville & Glen Luchford: Closed Contact

Installation view

Jenny Saville & Glen Luchford: Closed Contact Installation view

Jenny Saville & Glen Luchford: Closed Contact

Installation view

Works Exhibited

Jenny Saville & Glen Luchford, Closed Contact #14, 1995–96 C-print mounted in Plexiglas, 72 × 72 × 6 inches (182.9 × 182.9 × 15.2 cm), edition of 6

Jenny Saville & Glen Luchford, Closed Contact #14, 1995–96

C-print mounted in Plexiglas, 72 × 72 × 6 inches (182.9 × 182.9 × 15.2 cm), edition of 6

Jenny Saville & Glen Luchford, Closed Contact #14, 1995–96 C-print mounted in Plexiglas, 72 × 72 × 6 inches (182.9 × 182.9 × 15.2 cm), edition of 6

Jenny Saville & Glen Luchford, Closed Contact #14, 1995–96

C-print mounted in Plexiglas, 72 × 72 × 6 inches (182.9 × 182.9 × 15.2 cm), edition of 6

Jenny Saville & Glen Luchford, Closed Contact #10, 1995–96 C-print mounted in Plexiglas, 96 × 72 × 6 inches (243.8 × 182.9 × 15.2 cm), edition of 6

Jenny Saville & Glen Luchford, Closed Contact #10, 1995–96

C-print mounted in Plexiglas, 96 × 72 × 6 inches (243.8 × 182.9 × 15.2 cm), edition of 6

Jenny Saville & Glen Luchford, Closed Contact #13, 1995–96 C-print mounted in Plexiglas, 60 × 120 × 6 inches (152.4 × 304.8 × 15.2 cm), edition of 6

Jenny Saville & Glen Luchford, Closed Contact #13, 1995–96

C-print mounted in Plexiglas, 60 × 120 × 6 inches (152.4 × 304.8 × 15.2 cm), edition of 6

About

The images offer, not a story, but an experience that begins in visceral uneasiness and gradually shifts to a haunted serenity. The discomfort is complicated. It is triggered partly by our sense of the instantaneous monstrosity of a normal human transformed by the spreading of the shape beyond what we understood as normal.
—Katherine Dunn, from the exhibition catalogue

Gagosian is pleased to present the photographic series Closed Contact (1995–96). This collaboration between painter Jenny Saville and fashion photographer/filmmaker Glen Luchford confronts and challenges conceived notions of feminine beauty. The collusion of the art and fashion worlds has produced many hybrids in recent years, yet none perhaps as intensely striking as this series. In this body of work, the artists have created a new form of self-portraiture, using Saville as the model.

After observing operations of reconstructive and aesthetic surgery, Saville was eager to express the violence and anesthetized pain of this experience in her own work. Luchford and Saville began an artistic collaboration that captures the full range of color, tonality, and topography of live flesh in large photographic tableaux. Distortions confront and coerce the viewer into an examination of one’s own body and the grotesqueries and beauties inherent within. The images also recall biological specimens preserved, disembodied, and disfigured.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with an essay by acclaimed writer Katherine Dunn. A limited edition that will include a photographic print in a specially designed Plexiglas case will also be available.

Jenny Saville and Martin Gayford

In Conversation
Jenny Saville and Martin Gayford

Gagosian hosted a conversation between Jenny Saville and Martin Gayford, art critic and author, in conjunction with the exhibition Friends and Relations: Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach, Michael Andrews at Gagosian, Grosvenor Hill, London. Gayford also spoke with the artist about her works in the exhibition Jenny Saville: Latent at Gagosian, rue de Castiglione, Paris.

Image of Jenny Saville standing in front of her artworks

Jenny Saville: Latent

In this video, Jenny Saville describes the evolution of her practice inside her latest exhibition, Latent, at Gagosian, Paris. She addresses the genesis of the title and reflects on the anatomy of a painting.

Jenny Saville, Pietà I, 2019–21, charcoal and pastel on canvas

Jenny Saville: A cyclical rhythm of emergent forms

An exhibition curated by Sergio Risaliti, director of the Museo Novecento, Florence, pairs artworks by Jenny Saville with artists of the Italian Renaissance. On view across that city at the Museo Novecento, the Museo di Palazzo Vecchio, the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, the Museo degli Innocenti, and the Museo di Casa Buonarroti through February 20, 2022, the presentation features paintings and drawings by Saville from the 1990s through to work made especially for the occasion. Here, Risaliti reflects on the resonances and reverberations brought about by these pairings.

A Jenny Saville painting titled Self-Portrait (after Rembrandt), oil on paper

Jenny Saville: Painting the Self

Jenny Saville speaks with Nicholas Cullinan, the director of the National Portrait Gallery, London, about her latest self-portrait, her studio practice, and the historical painters to whom she continually returns.

Jenny Saville’s Prism (2020) on the cover of Gagosian Quarterly magazine.

Now available
Gagosian Quarterly Winter 2020

The Winter 2020 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring Jenny Saville’s Prism (2020) on its cover.

Jenny Saville, Study for Pentimenti I, 2011, graphite and pastel on paper.

Shortlist
Five Preoccupations: Jenny Saville

Jenny Saville shares a selection of the books, films, and more that have been her companions in the quiet of the shutdowns in recent months and as she looks ahead to a new exhibition next year.

News

Photo: courtesy the artist

Artist Spotlight

Jenny Saville

July 22–28, 2020

In her depictions of the human form, Jenny Saville transcends the boundaries of both classical figuration and modern abstraction. Oil paint, applied in heavy layers, becomes as visceral as flesh itself, each painted mark maintaining a supple, mobile life of its own. As Saville pushes, smears, and scrapes the pigment over her large-scale canvases, the distinctions between living, breathing bodies and their painted representations begin to collapse.

Photo: courtesy the artist