Jenny Saville

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Jenny Saville Exhibited at The Saatchi Gallery

Strategy (South Face/Front Face/North Face)
Jenny Saville
Strategy (South Face/Front Face/North Face)

1993/1994

Oil on canvas (triptych)

274 x 640 cm 108 x 252''
Fulcrum
Jenny Saville
Fulcrum

1999

Oil on canvas (triptych)

261.6 x 487.7 cm 103 x 193''
Trace
Jenny Saville
Trace

1993-94

Oil on canvas (triptych)

213.5 x 165 cm 84 x 65''
Plan
Jenny Saville
Plan

1993

Oil on canvas

274 x 213.5 cm 108 x 84''
Host
Jenny Saville
Host

2000

Oil on canvas

304.8 x 457.2 cm 120 x 180''
Shift
Jenny Saville
Shift

1996-97

Oil on canvas

330.2 x 330.2 cm 130 x 130''
Hybrid
Jenny Saville
Hybrid

1997

Oil on canvas

274.3 x 213.4 cm 108 x 84''
Propped
Jenny Saville
Propped

1992

Oil on canvas

213.5 x 183 cm
Prop
Jenny Saville
Prop

1993

Oil on canvas

213.5 x 183 cm
Passage
Jenny Saville
Passage

2004

Oil on canvas

336 x 290 cm
Jenny Saville: With the transvestite I was searching for a body that was between genders. I had explored that idea a little in Matrix. The idea of floating gender that is not fixed. The transvestite I worked with has a natural penis and false silicone breasts. Thirty or forty years ago this body couldn’t have existed and I was looking for a kind of contemporary architecture of the body. I wanted to paint a visual passage through gender – a sort of gender landscape. To scale from the penis, across a stomach to the breasts, and finally the head. I tried to make the lips and eyes be very seductive and use directional mark-making to move your eye around the flesh.

Simon Schama: So you really do manipulate what’s in front of you through the mark-making. It’s very striking – I’m looking at a photograph of your transvestite painting Passage and that passage that moves from the penis and balls to the belly is really about the anatomy of paint as it constructs the body.

Jenny Saville: I have to really work at the tension between getting the paint to have the sensory quality that I want and be constructive in terms of building the form of a stomach, for example, or creating the inner crevice of a thigh. The more I do it, the more the space between abstraction and figuration becomes interesting. I want a painting realism. I try to consider the pace of a painting, of active and quiet areas. Listening to music helps a lot, especially music where there’s a hard sound and then soft breathable passages. In my earlier work my marks were less varied. I think of each mark or area as having the possibility of carrying a sensation. (Extract from ‘Interview with Jenny Saville by Simon Schama)
Torso 2
Jenny Saville
Torso 2

2004

Oil on canvas

360 x 294 cm

Jenny Saville’s monumental paintings wallow in the glory of expansiveness. Jenny Saville is a real painter’s painter. She constructs painting with the weighty heft of sculpture. Her exaggerated nudes point up, with an agonizing frankness, the disparity between the way women are perceived and the way that they feel about their bodies. One of the most striking aspects of Jenny Saville’s work is the sheer physicality of it. Jenny Saville paints skin with all the subtlety of a Swedish massage; violent, painful, bruising, bone crunching.


Jenny Saville's Biography

Born in 1970, Cambridge, England
Lives and works in Oxford, England


SOLO EXHIBITIONS


2010
Jenny Saville, Gagosian Gallery, London

2005
 Jenny Saville, Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Roma, Rome.

2004
 Large Scale Polaroids by Jenny Saville and Glen LuchfordUniversity of Massachusetts Amherst, East Gallery.

2003
 Migrants, Gagosian Gallery, New York (Chelsea).

2002
 Jenny Saville/Glen Luchford: Closed Contact, Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills.

1999
 Territories, Gagosian Gallery, New York (SoHo)

1996
 Jenny Saville/Glen Luchford: A Collaboration, Pace McGill Gallery, New York


GROUP EXHIBITIONS


2010
Crash, Gagosian Gallery, London

2009
Paint Made Flesh, memorial Art Gallery Of The University of Rochester, Rochester, NY
Paint Made Flesh, The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC
Paint Made Flesh, First Centre For The Visual Arts, Nashville, TN

2007
Global Feminism, Davis Museum and Cultural Center, Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA
Berlinde de Bruyckere, Jenny Saville, Dan Flavin, Kunstmuseum Luzern, Luzern
All The More Real, Portrayals of Intimacy and Empathy, Parrish Art Museum, Southampton,NY
Global feminisms remix, Booklyn museum Of Art, New York City, NY
Summer Show, Gagosian Gallery, West 24th Street, New York City, NY
Timer 01, Triennale Bovisa, Milan
Global Feminisms, Brooklyn Museum Of Art, New York City, NY

2006
POW! QPCA, Quality pictures, Portland, OR
Zuruck Zur Figur, Malerei Der Gegnwart, Kunsthalle Der Hypo-Kulturstiftung, Munich
Speaking with Hands, Museum Folkwang Essen, Essen
Damien Hirst, David Salle, Jenny Saville, The bilotti Chapel, Museo carlo Bilotti, Rome
British Art, a post war collection, Thomas Gibson Fine Art, London
Painting Codes, GC.AV, Galleria Comunale D’arte Contemporanea de Monfalcone, Monfalcone

2005
 The Figure In and Out of Space, Gagosian Gallery,
New York (Chelsea)
Il Male. Esercizi di Pittura Crudele,
Pallazina di Caccia di Stupinigi, Turin, Italy

2004
 Summer Exhibition, Royal Academy of Arts, London.
Drawings, Gagosian Gallery, London (Heddon)
SITE Sante Fe’s Fifth International Biennial:
Disparities and Deformations: Our Grotesque (curated by Robert Storr), SITE Santa Fe, NM (through 2005).
Galleon and Other Stories, the Saatchi Gallery, London.

2003
 50th International Biennale di Venezia:
Painting (curated by Francesco Bonami),
Museo Correr, Venice, Italy

2002
 The Physical World: An Exhibition of Painting and Sculpture, Gagosian Gallery, New York.
The Nude In 20th Century Art, Kunsthalle Emden, Germany.
Traveled to: Arken Museum of Modern Art, Copenhagen (through 2003).
Women, Eyestorm Gallery, London.

2001
 Les Voluptes (curated by E. Winner),
Borusan Centre for Contemporary Art, Istanbul, Turkey.
Narcissus, National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh.
Great British Paintings from American Collections: Holbein to Hockney, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT.
Traveled to Huntington Art Collections, San Marino, CA (through 2002).
Naked Since 1950, C&M Arts, New York.
Art, Age and Genders, Orleans House Gallery, Riverside, Twickenham, England.
Traveled to: Usher Gallery, Lincoln, Lincolnshire, England; New Greenham Arts, Newbury, Berkshire, England (through 2004).

2000
 Painting the Century: 101 Masterpieces, 1900-2000, National Portrait Gallery, London (through 2001).
Ant Noises 2, the Saatchi Gallery, London.
Ant Noises, the Saatchi Gallery, London.

1999
 Unconvention (curated by Jeremy Deller), Centre for Visual Arts, Cardiff, Wales (through 2000).
The Nude in Contemporary Art (curated by Harry Philbrick and Richard Klein),
The Aldrich Museum of Art, Ridgefield, CT.
The Figure: Another Side of Modernism (curated by Lily Wei), the Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art, Snug Harbor Cultural Center, Staten Island, NY.

1998
 Extensions of the Body—Aspects of the Figure, Joseloff Gallery, University of Hartford, CT.
Close Echoes—Public Bodies and Artificial Space, Kunsthalle, Prague, Czech Republic.
The Ugly Show (curated by Moira Innes), Bracknell Arts Center, Leeds, England.
Traveled to: Metropolitan University, Leeds, England.

1997
 Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection, Royal Academy of the Arts, London.
Traveled to: Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, NY (through 1999).
From the Interior, Kingston University, London.
Traveled to: Brighton City Art Gallery, England; Ferrens Gallery, Hull, England

1996
 Bad Blood, Glasgow School of Art, Scotland.
Contemporary British Art ’96, Museum of Kalmar, Stockholm.
Sad, Gasworks, London.
Art On, Halmstadt, Sweden

1995
 American Passion: The Susan Kasen Summer and Robert D. Summer Collection of Contemporary British Painting (curated by Susie Allen, RCA and Stefan Van Raay), McLellan Galleries, Glasgow, Scotland.
Traveled to: Royal College of Art, London; Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT.
The Continuing Tradition: 75 Years of Painting, Glasgow School of Art, Scotland.

1994
 Young British Artists III, the Saatchi Gallery, London

1993
 SSA, Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh, Scotland
Critics Choice, Cooling Gallery, London

1990
 Contemporary ’90, Royal College of Art, London.
British Portrait Competition, National Portrait Gallery, London

1989
 Self Portraits, The Burrell Collection, Glasgow, Scotland