Jenny Saville

Saville’s painting is steeped in a multitude of times and places. Working with expressive and energetic brushstrokes, she creates dramatic juxtapositions of color and shimmering light effects that recall Byzantine icons and mosaics, which were designed to take on a spellbinding and spiritually transcendent glow when lit by flickering candlelight. Saville also illuminates some of the works in Elpis with gold oil bar, invoking the precious metal’s association with divine embodiment, a tradition dating back to the ancient Egyptians, who imagined gold to be the “flesh of the gods,” and the Greek myth of Danaë, who was impregnated by Zeus in a shower of golden rain.

Saville’s references and techniques span Western art history—combining the striking chiaroscuro of Baroque portraiture with the dappled light of Impressionist plein air painting—and also encompass snapshots and visual effects from everyday life. The raw chromatic vitality of Saville’s new works was largely inspired by her recent travels to Australia, where she encountered the luminous, fleshy palette of Emily Kame Kngwarreye’s virtuoso paintings. For the fiery-toned pastel painting Prism (2020), Saville combines her tribute to the Indigenous Australian artist with another: she created this work using a set of crayons purchased from Henri Roché’s La Maison du Pastel, a famous art supply store in Paris once frequented by Edgar Degas.

Saville paints from photographs of models, often singling out and magnifying individual body parts that capture her attention: the vulnerable intensity of a wide-eyed stare, or the provocative glimmer of lips and pale teeth. In the self-portrait Virtual (2020), featured earlier this year in the first season of Gagosian’s Artist Spotlight series, Saville compartmentalizes her facial features into disorienting boxes that recall windows jostling for space on a computer screen, or the stream of talking heads that populate news broadcasts and online webinars. At the brink between realism and abstraction, Virtual recalls fragmented portrait heads by Pablo Picasso and Francis Bacon as much as it points to the increasing slippage between the physical and the virtual in today’s image-saturated world.