May 15, 2019

Visions of the Self:
Jenny Saville on Rembrandt

Jenny Saville reveals the process behind her new self-portrait, painted in response to Rembrandt’s masterpiece Self-Portrait with Two Circles, for an exhibition at Gagosian London. She details the extensive influence Rembrandt has had on her painting practice.

Artwork: © The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved. DACS 2019; © Georg Baselitz; © The Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2019; © Glenn Brown; © Urs Fischer; © The Lucian Freud Archive/Bridgeman Images; © Ellen Gallagher; © Damien Hirst and Science Ltd. All rights reserved. DACS 2019; © Howard Hodgkin Estate; © Estate of Roy Lichtenstein/DACS 2019; © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2019; Self Portrait, 1988 © Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. Used by permission; © Giuseppe Penone; © Succession Picasso/DACS, London 2019; © Richard Prince; © Nathaniel Mary Quinn; © Charles Ray, courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery; © Gerhard Richter 2019 (040019); © Jenny Saville; © Cindy Sherman, courtesy the artist and Metro Pictures, New York; © Rudolf Stingel; © Christopher Wool; video: Emma Charles, Miriam Perez, and PerryDuke; Visions of the Self: Rembrandt and Now, in partnership with English Heritage, Gagosian, Grosvenor Hill, London, April 12–May 18, 2019

Gagosian quarterly weekend reads

Get the best of the Quarterly in your inbox twice a month.

By subscribing you agree to our Privacy Policy.

Gagosian Quarterly Summer 2026

Now available
Gagosian Quarterly Summer 2026

The Summer 2026 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring Ellen Gallagher’s Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish (2026) on the cover.

Jenny Saville a Ca’ Pesaro

Jenny Saville a Ca’ Pesaro

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.

Francis Bacon: Reinventing Realism

Francis Bacon: Reinventing Realism

Francis Bacon lived and worked in Paris for a decade starting in the mid-1970s. The city and the art he encountered there provided a profound backdrop for his austere late style, which often brings together smooth, colorful backgrounds, spare architectural signifiers, and sculptural human forms. Here, three striking paintings from that period are considered by Sebastian Smee.

Giuseppe Penone: The Reflection of Bronze

Giuseppe Penone: The Reflection of Bronze

Adam D. Weinberg has been working with Giuseppe Penone on an exhibition of the artist’s new sculptures, The Reflection of Bronze, that opens at Gagosian, New York, on April 22. The works explore the character and possibilities of bronze. Here, Weinberg considers Penone’s enduring engagement with the alloy and addresses the conceptual underpinnings of the exhibition’s three-room structure.

Engaging with the Past: An Interview with Jenny Saville

Engaging with the Past: An Interview with Jenny Saville

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.

Georg Baselitz and the Possibilities of Print

Georg Baselitz and the Possibilities of Print

On the occasion of Baselitz: AVANTI! at the Museo Novecento in Florence, Italy, Holly EJ Black considers the roots and reverberations of Georg Baselitz’s printmaking.

Helter Skelter: Arthur Jafa and Richard Prince

Helter Skelter: Arthur Jafa and Richard Prince

Helter Skelter—an exhibition at Fondazione Prada’s Venetian venue, Ca’ Corner della Regina—marks the first creative dialogue between two visionaries of American art, Arthur Jafa and Richard Prince. The show explores the grit, grift, violence, and ingenuity of American culture through more than fifty works, including photography, video, and large-scale installations that interrogate themes of race, gender, media, and politics. In the interview below, Nancy Spector, the exhibition’s curator, speaks about the shared motifs—from apocalyptic sunsets to a fascination with “monstrosity”—that led her to pair these artists for the first time.

Ellen Gallagher: Submergent Visions

Ellen Gallagher: Submergent Visions

Sharad Chari reflects on a recent visit to Ellen Gallagher’s studio in Rotterdam, Netherlands, thinking through the artist’s intertextual interrogation of the oceanic and the ways in which her practice is informed by a wider Black intellectual and artistic world, an abiding interest in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, and the imperatives that surround this studio by the Port of Rotterdam.

Roy Lichtenstein’s New York Boyhood

Roy Lichtenstein’s New York Boyhood

Avis Berman’s biography of Roy Lichtenstein, Becoming Roy Lichtenstein: The Path to Pop, will be published this fall by Abbeville Press, aligning with a major retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, in October. For the Quarterly she has adapted part of her text to focus on the artist’s formative experiences in New York in the 1920s and ’30s.

Stella McCartney and Jeff Koons

Stella McCartney and Jeff Koons

Stella McCartney’s new limited-edition capsule collection made in collaboration with Jeff Koons launched in January 2026. Blending the two creators’ singular visions, the collection, which was first seen in McCartney’s Winter 2025 runway show, features a wide array of garments and accessories printed with artworks by Koons and slogans by McCartney. The collaboration continues the pair’s long-standing creative partnership, which has previously included jewelry, prints, and charitable initiatives. At the unveiling in New York, Koons met with Derek C. Blasberg to reflect on the collaboration, the importance of caring and community, and meeting Salvador Dalí when he was nineteen years old.

Gagosian Quarterly Winter 2025

Now available
Gagosian Quarterly Winter 2025

The Winter 2025 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring Jeff Koons’s Kissing Lovers (2016–25) on the cover.

Christopher Wool: See Stop Run

Christopher Wool: See Stop Run

Jonathan Griffin traveled to Marfa to see the second iteration of Christopher Wool’s See Stop Run exhibition and to talk with the artist about his latest work, and about the photography series and sculptures that grew from his time in the Texas town.