Jenny Saville

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The volume is dedicated to the work of Jenny Saville (Cambridge, 1970), one of the greatest contemporary painters and a leading voice in the international art scene.

Though forward-looking, her work reveals a deep awareness, both intellectual and sensory, of how the body has been represented over time and across cultures—from antique and Hindu sculpture, to Renaissance drawing and painting, to the work of modern artists such as Henri Matisse, Willem de Kooning, and Pablo Picasso.Published on the occasion of Jenny Saville: Elpis, an exhibition of new portraits by the artist at Gagosian, New York. 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.

The British artist Jenny Saville is best known for painting monumental close-ups of large nude women exposing things that are usually left unshown: flab, fat, bulge. This is the opulently printed hardbound catalogue produced in conjunction with the 2002 Gagosian Gallery Beverly Hills exhibition of collaborative photographs by Jenny Saville and Glen Luchford. Oil paint, applied in heavy layers, becomes as visceral as flesh itself, each painted mark maintaining a supple, mobile life of its own.Profusely illustrated first monograph on a painter whose talent and subject matter earned her comparisons to such greats as Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud. I find the shock value of some of the subjects a little old, but have no problem because the pure application of paint and line is so very beautiful.