Jenny Saville

Product Information

Previously, he was director of the Henry Moore Foundation and director of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh.

The imagery is perhaps not for everyone, but I have never yet met a serious painter who has commented disparagingly on her work. Thirteen years after her first Rizzoli monograph, British artist Jenny Saville releases this much-anticipated volume - her most comprehensive to date - including many never-before-published paintings. It sounds sickeningly romantic but you get used to a sort of sense of failure, even if it’s a kind of optimistic failure that makes you carry on. The publication documents the twelve paintings in the exhibition alongside photographs of the artist s studio and reference materials, including snapshots taken by Saville. She speaks candidly on her endless passion for painting the figure, the beauty of struggle, motherhood, and the artists that have inspired her.This exhibition, curated from the Hill Collection by Karel Schampers, examines the human body through figurative work from the last five hundred years. Some of these published works include ZENG FANZHI: Paintings, Drawings, And Two Sculptures, Sprayed - Works from 1929 to 2015, Jenny Saville, John Currin, and In the Studio.

Saville transcends the limits between figurative and abstract, between informal and gestural, managing to transfigure the news into a universal image, which puts the human figure at the center of the history of art. This epic poem was found on a series of ancient tablets from Mesopotamia written down over 4,000 years ago, and involves the central character Gilgamesh, an excessive and oppressive leader, and his arduous journey in pursuit of the secrets of immortality.Huge, naked bodies, with a carnal physicality and oppressed by a weight that is more existential than material, Seville is linked to the great European pictorial tradition in constant comparison with the modernism of Willem de Kooning and Cy Twombly and the portraiture of Pablo Picasso and Francis Bacon.

An exhibition curated by Sergio Risaliti, director of the Museo Novecento, Florence, pairs artworks by Jenny Saville with artists of the Italian Renaissance. Perhaps the next monograph, and there surely will be one as Saville continues to grow and mature, will give us more new work. This beautifully produced monograph is an important addition to the library on one of the world's most influential and enduring living painters. The foundation’s collection of Renaissance bronzes is featured alongside works by artists such as Francis Bacon, Richard Prince, Jenny Saville, Rudolf Stingel, and Andy Warhol. The portrait I painted that is being featured in the Artist Spotlight series was made with these ideas in mind.For the conceptual underpinnings of her work, she has been hailed as one of the most interesting artists of the last decade. From Linda Nochlin's essay: "It is as though a Sargent had mated with a de Kooning before our eyes, and the coupling was more of a violent struggle than a love match. He is coauthor, along with Annalyn Swan, of the 2005 Pulitzer Prize-winning de Kooning: An American Master.

He is currently at work on a book about the Anglo-American relationship and an eight part television series for the BBC, The Power of Art. She is hopefully coming out with another series within the next 10 years, but we will have to wait and see.It also features a poem by Anna Akhmatova, whose work Saville learned about while she was in Russia, where she photographed many of the models pictured in the paintings. Profusely illustrated first monograph on a painter whose talent and subject matter earned her comparisons to such greats as Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud. Indeed, Saville is deeply interested in the resilience and fragility of the human body, as well as its societal implications and taboos. Through these letters, you follow Michelangelo going to Rome at the age of twenty-one and corresponding with his father about sending him his drawings, problems with marble shipments due to bad weather, money troubles, and a nun who claims to be family and wants financial support. All other considerations aside, Jenny Saville can paint, and this book proves it, close up and pouring across the pages.