Jenny Saville

Product Information

The paintings affect us because we relate so deeply to them. They depict the most basic shared human experience: the relationship between an infant child and their mother. A relationship that I had, you had, and, our faith teaches us, Jesus had.

Accompanying NOW is a group display drawn from the National Galleries of Scotland collection, including works by Oladele Bamgboye, Miroslav Balka, Alex Dordoy, Alexis Hunter and Francesca Woodman, until 22 May 2018. This will be followed by the Tesco Bank Art Competition for Schools, which opens on Saturday 26 May and runs until 16 September 2018.Her work also outlines a strong correlation with the masters of the Italian Renaissance, in particular with some of Michelangelo’s great masterpieces. Jenny Saville was born in Cambridge on the 7th of May, 1970, to parents working in education. As a child, Saville moved to several different schools, following her father’s dynamic career as a school administrator. Saville was interested in art from the age of eight and her parents encouraged her to pursue independent work. Jenny Saville’s The Mothers was inspired by art historical depictions of mothers, as well as the artist’s personal experiences. Leonardo da Vinci’s The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and Saint John the Baptist was an important source of inspiration for the artist. Her parents had a reproduction of Da Vinci’s drawing in their home, which Saville viewed as a kind of permanence.

There are several important Jenny Saville drawings and paintings that can be discussed as seminal works by the artist. Saville’s Passage was made at a time where LGBTQIA+ issues were starting to present themselves in contemporary societies, which led to Saville wanting to create work that challenged the social constructs around gender. SAVILLE: Ruth Bader Ginsburg talked about how the gates will open to allow more people to get through. I feel that, and so do you. But I often wonder, when exactly will the gates open? NCI’ve noticed this increasingly cubistic aspect to your work—the collaging, the different viewpoints presented simultaneously— He unfortunately died from the Spanish flu, the last pandemic we had, when he was twenty-eight. We hardly got to see him at all. He made this concentrated body of work that was brilliant and unusual. He was in that fertile atmosphere of Vienna with Klimt and the Vienna Secession, but there was something unique about Schiele.SAVILLE: And also, we think of poetry as kind of quaint and gentle, not as something that’s threatening to the government. In 2019 my work was censored in China, which I couldn’t believe. All my life people have told me that I was a traditionalist because I paint in oil and because I paint figures. But in China, they actually wouldn’t publish my paintings. A young artist there modeled for me, and I told her I’d send her a book of my work, but she asked me not to because she didn’t want to get in trouble. NICHOLAS CULLINANI wanted to begin by asking you about the new self-portrait that you’ve been working on. Could you talk about that work and the process of making it? GAY: Hearing about the conditions under which some people create art is truly eye opening. It always makes me realize that, as underappreciated as the arts may be in the Western world, we at least have the freedom to make it. But Saville’s work is not explicitly Christian: It is not about Jesus. Her work is about the figure. These paintings are about how one human form relates to another. How the flesh of a child relates to that of his mother. And I think she gets it. Better yet, she helps me to understand it. GAY: That makes sense. I certainly have other forms of criticism in my life: editors and trusted readers.

Her work was showcased at the 2019 and 2022 Contemporary Istanbul with Berman Contemporary and her latest solo exhibition, titled Sociogenesis: Resilience under Fire, curated by Els van Mourik, was exhibited in 2020 at Berman Contemporary in Johannesburg. Attewell also exhibited at the main section of the 2022 Investec Cape Town Art Fair. As opposed to the evolving image which an intuitive painter may develop erasing and sacrificing throughout responding to the materiality of the medium. One word to describe Saville’s work is carnal. And some of her most affecting works are the self-portraits of her with her young children. Mark Stevens calls them mammalian, because “they remember, restore, and respect the animal link between mother and child that exists before words, a connection more ancient than humankind itself.” They are not totally novel: Saville is painting within a tradition. The works directly reference drawings of the Virgin and child by Leonardo da Vinci and other maternal archetypes from the canon.Christine Borland’s Positive Pattern was originally commissioned by the Institute of Transplantation, Newcastle to honour the courage and generosity of organ donors and their families, who help save and transform the lives of hundreds of people every year. Comprising five abstract sculptures produced in dense foam, this poignant and powerful work renders in three dimensions the interior spaces of carved wooden sculptures by the British sculptor Barbara Hepworth (1903-75), including Wave (1943-44), which is held in the National Galleries of Scotland collection. Jenny Saville’s career as an artist started early. She painted since she was a child and even had her own studio as a seven-year-old, which at the time was only a broom cupboard. In an interview with the Royal Academy Magazine, the artist said: “Grown-ups would come to the house and ask me what I was going to do when I grew up. I would always think, what do they mean? I’m an artist.” Saville would later study at the Glasgow School of Art and earn her degree in 1992. At her graduate show, she sold all her works and one of the exhibited paintings was used for the cover of the Times Saturday Review. JS As a teenager I was fascinated by his work. I even liked the way he looked, with his crazy hair. His work and life spoke to that teenage angst, that rite of passage when you’re unsure about yourself. But at the same time, his line was strong and confident. What a draftsman he was! One of the surest lines in art history. NCOn Picasso and Cubism, there’s also his incredible, very late self-portrait from 1972, the year before he died. GAY: That’s a good question. The gates are opening in the writing world a little bit, but they’re not opening as widely as people like to believe. An article in the New York Times showed that between 1950 and 2018, only 5 percent of all published fiction was written by people of color. I really thought we’d been making more progress than that. At the same time, there are a lot of white writers who sincerely believe, “I’m white, so there is no way my book is going to get published,” even though white people comprise 95 percent of the publishing world.

SAVILLE: You’ve got this amazing confidence, and I’m wondering, does it come from your willingness to reveal vulnerabilities? For me, I’m very conscious that I’m going to die one day, which makes staying brutally, viscerally true seem urgent and worthwhile.You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs. Compare Standard and Premium Digital here. Jenny Saville’s works have often been described as important examples of feminist art. Even though Saville herself claimed to be more interested in bodies in general than specifically female bodies, her work is still greatly influenced by feminist theories and writers, like the écriture feminine , the philosopher Julia Kristeva, and Luce Irigaray. Écriture feminine, which can be translated with “women’s writing” aimed for a way of writing that offers a new approach from a feminine perspective and that does not align with the predominant masculine and patriarchal literary tradition. The philosophers Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray contributed to the écriture feminine. Saville said in an interview “ I was trying to attempt to paint the female and they were attempting to write the female.”