![Jenny Saville: Erota](https://gagosian.com/media/images/quarterly/jenny-saville-erota/8rLD_z_FSdiF_300x300.jpg)
Jenny Saville: Erota
Richard Calvocoressi discusses the inspiration behind the artist’s new body of work.
I’m trying to see if it’s possible to hold that tipping moment of perception or have several moments coexist . . . like looking at a memory.
—Jenny Saville
Gagosian is pleased to present Erota, a group of recent drawings by Jenny Saville.
Over her twenty-five-year career, Saville has taken the depiction of the human form in unprecedented directions. Her visceral embodiments confront issues of mortality while attesting to a tenacious formal engagement with the problems and innovations of both classical figuration and radical abstraction.
In the figures of large, sprawling nudes, inspired in part by Titian to Canaletto: Drawing in Venice, a recent exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, Saville demonstrates her acute sensitivity to the problems and challenges faced by the Old Masters—including Rembrandt, Raphael, and Titian—while bringing a specifically modern sensibility to bear on classical drawing traditions. The shifting forms and multiple contours of her writhing and coupling figures—in oil stain, pastel, and charcoal on canvas—evoke a world in flux, consistent with the idea that no single reality or perspective can ever be definitive. These corporeal images are like landscapes that reveal themselves to the viewer in real time.
Saville’s forceful marks suggest destruction, regeneration, and a cyclical rhythm of emerging forms, imparting eros, or life force, to her art.
Richard Calvocoressi discusses the inspiration behind the artist’s new body of work.
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.
Lauren Mahony previews the Kunsthaus Zürich exhibition, which paired the works of Jenny Saville and Egon Schiele together.