Installation video
Installation view
© Jenny Saville. Photo: Mike Bruce
Installation view
© Jenny Saville. Photo: Mike Bruce
Installation view
© Jenny Saville. Photo: Mike Bruce
Installation view
© Jenny Saville. Photo: Mike Bruce
Installation view
© Jenny Saville. Photo: Mike Bruce
Installation view
© Jenny Saville. Photo: Mike Bruce
Installation view
© Jenny Saville. Photo: Mike Bruce
Installation view
© Jenny Saville. Photo: Mike Bruce
Installation view
© Jenny Saville. Photo: Mike Bruce
Installation view
© Jenny Saville. Photo: Mike Bruce
Installation view
© Jenny Saville. Photo: Mike Bruce
Jenny Saville
Untitled, 2014
Pastel and charcoal on canvas, 66 ⅞ × 98 ⅜ inches (170 × 250 cm)
© Jenny Saville. Photo: Mike Bruce
Jenny Saville
In the realm of the Mothers III, 2014
Pastel, charcoal, and oil on canvas, 94 ½ × 144 ⅛ inches (240 × 366 cm)
© Jenny Saville. Photo: Mike Bruce
Jenny Saville
Odalisque, 2012–14
Oil and charcoal on canvas, 85 ⅜ × 93 ⅛ inches (217 × 236.5 cm)
© Jenny Saville. Photo: Mike Bruce
Jenny Saville
In the realm of the Mothers I, 2012–14
Charcoal on canvas, 98 ⅜ × 130 ¾ × 2 inches (249.8 × 332.2 × 5 cm)
© Jenny Saville. Photo: Mike Bruce
Jenny Saville
Intertwine, 2011–14
Oil on canvas, 86 ⅜ × 114 ⅛ × 2 ½ inches (219.5 × 290 × 6.5 cm)
© Jenny Saville. Photo: Mike Bruce
Gagosian is pleased to present the first-ever solo exhibition of Jenny Saville’s paintings in London.
Captivated by the endless aesthetic and formal possibilities of the materiality of the human body, Saville makes a highly sensuous and tactile impression of surface and mass in her monumental oil paintings. Subjects are imbued with a sculptural yet elusive dimensionality that verges on the abstract. In recent paintings, she renews her enduring figurative investigations by depicting bodies embracing and intertwined.
Several new works are inspired by the ancient Egyptian rubbish dump at Oxyrhynchus, one of the most important archeological sites ever discovered. Heaps of discarded documents and literature, incredibly preserved in the area’s dry climate, are now invaluable; fragments of ancient Greek texts such as Euclid’s Elements and the poems of Sappho are among the excavated papyri. Saville alludes to this history through a deep layering of paired subjects: faces, torsos, and limbs overlap with shadows and reflections, palimpsests of living bodies and ancestral apparitions. Silhouettes drawn in charcoal through the surfaces of oil paint underscore the motion of the central embracing figures, while evoking the timeless human process of sketching. These intermediate “studies” echo the shifting status of the unearthed papers—once discarded, now treasured.
Time is further compressed by Saville’s adaptation of various historical approaches to portraiture, including de Kooning’s fluid abstractions of the female figure, the almost combined couples of Picasso’s late paintings and Japanese shunga prints, and Titian’s placement of subjects within dramatic perspectival landscapes, exemplified by Nymph and Shepherd (c. 1570–75). Saville’s own figures merge ethereally with settings that have been loosely appropriated from photographs and evoke the backdrops of Renaissance paintings.
In this video, Jenny Saville sits down inside her first major exhibition in Venice to discuss how the great Venetian artists of the past and the city’s heritage influence her work. The show brings together more than thirty canvases and works on paper from the 1990s to the present, tracing the development of her practice, which is deeply rooted in the history of painting.
On March 28, a major exhibition of Jenny Saville’s work opened at Ca’ Pesaro–Galleria Internazionale d’Arte Moderna in Venice, bringing together nearly thirty paintings from the 1990s to the present. The exhibition is curated by Elisabetta Barisoni, head of the museums division at Venice’s Ca’ Pesaro, Museo Fortuny, and head of MUVE in Mestre. Saville’s monumental canvases are set in dialogue with the great Venetian artists of the past, creating a unique encounter between contemporary painting and the city’s artistic heritage. Here, the artist speaks with Stefania Ventra, professor with Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, about her early trips to Venice, the radicality of Titian’s painting, and depicting emotional truth.
Ahead of her exhibition over the summer at the National Portrait Gallery, London, Jenny Saville met with the novelist Douglas Stuart to discuss Glasgow, the beauty and blemishes of bodies, and their respective creative processes.
Jenny Saville reflects on Cy Twombly’s poetic engagement with the world, with time and tension, and with growth in this excerpt from her Marion Barthelme Lecture, presented at the Menil Collection, Houston, in 2024.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The Winter 2020 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring Jenny Saville’s Prism (2020) on its cover.
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.
Jenny Saville speaks with Nicholas Cullinan, the director of the National Portrait Gallery, London, from her studio. They discuss portraiture, her latest work, and her art historical influences, as well as the shifting nature of perception in the age of digital communication.
The two artists discuss being drawn to difficult subjects, the effects of motherhood on their practice, embracing chance, and their shared adoration of Cy Twombly.
Jenny Saville reveals the process behind her new self-portrait, painted in response to Rembrandt’s masterpiece Self-Portrait with Two Circles.
The Spring 2019 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring Red Pot with Lute Player #2 by Jonas Wood on its cover.
On the occasion of a major survey of the artist’s work, Dr. Simon Groom, Director of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, studies the evolution of Jenny Saville’s practice.
In this video, Jenny Saville speaks about Ancestors and her new works currently on view at Gagosian, West 21st Street, New York.
Jenny Saville discusses the beginnings and evolutions of her painting practice with Dr. Simon Groom, Director of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh. She speaks candidly on her endless passion for painting the figure, the beauty of struggle, motherhood, and the artists that have inspired her.
In 2013, the exhibition Willem de Kooning: Ten Paintings, 1983–1985 explored the legendary artist’s late work. For the catalogue accompanying the presentation, Jenny Saville spoke on the gestures and elemental elegance of these paintings.
Diana Widmaier Picasso, curator of the exhibition Desire, reflects on the history of eroticism in art.
Richard Calvocoressi discusses the inspiration behind the artist’s new body of work.
