Menu

Extended through July 9, 2016

Jenny Saville

Erota

April 14–July 9, 2016
Davies Street, London

Installation view Artwork © Jenny Saville. Photo: Mike Bruce

Installation view

Artwork © Jenny Saville. Photo: Mike Bruce

Installation view Artwork © Jenny Saville. Photo: Mike Bruce

Installation view

Artwork © Jenny Saville. Photo: Mike Bruce

Installation view Artwork © Jenny Saville. Photo: Mike Bruce

Installation view

Artwork © Jenny Saville. Photo: Mike Bruce

Works Exhibited

Jenny Saville, One out of two (symposium), 2016 Charcoal and pastel on canvas, 59 ⅞ × 88 ⅝ inches (152 × 225 cm)© Jenny Saville. Photo: Mike Bruce

Jenny Saville, One out of two (symposium), 2016

Charcoal and pastel on canvas, 59 ⅞ × 88 ⅝ inches (152 × 225 cm)
© Jenny Saville. Photo: Mike Bruce

Jenny Saville, Ebb and Flow, 2015 Oil stain, pastel, and charcoal on canvas, 63 × 102 ⅜ inches (160 × 260 cm)© Jenny Saville

Jenny Saville, Ebb and Flow, 2015

Oil stain, pastel, and charcoal on canvas, 63 × 102 ⅜ inches (160 × 260 cm)
© Jenny Saville

About

I’m trying to see if it’s possible to hold that tipping moment of perception or have several moments coexist . . . like looking at a memory.
—Jenny Saville

Gagosian is pleased to present Erota, a group of recent drawings by Jenny Saville.

Over her twenty-five-year career, Saville has taken the depiction of the human form in unprecedented directions. Her visceral embodiments confront issues of mortality while attesting to a tenacious formal engagement with the problems and innovations of both classical figuration and radical abstraction.

In the figures of large, sprawling nudes, inspired in part by Titian to Canaletto: Drawing in Venice, a recent exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, Saville demonstrates her acute sensitivity to the problems and challenges faced by the Old Masters—including Rembrandt, Raphael, and Titian—while bringing a specifically modern sensibility to bear on classical drawing traditions. The shifting forms and multiple contours of her writhing and coupling figures—in oil stain, pastel, and charcoal on canvas—evoke a world in flux, consistent with the idea that no single reality or perspective can ever be definitive. These corporeal images are like landscapes that reveal themselves to the viewer in real time.

Saville’s forceful marks suggest destruction, regeneration, and a cyclical rhythm of emerging forms, imparting eros, or life force, to her art.

Jenny Saville: Erota

Jenny Saville: Erota

Richard Calvocoressi discusses the inspiration behind the artist’s new body of work.

Jenny Saville and Martin Gayford

In Conversation
Jenny Saville and Martin Gayford

Gagosian hosted a conversation between Jenny Saville and Martin Gayford, art critic and author, in conjunction with the exhibition Friends and Relations: Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach, Michael Andrews at Gagosian, Grosvenor Hill, London. Gayford also spoke with the artist about her works in the exhibition Jenny Saville: Latent at Gagosian, rue de Castiglione, Paris.

Image of Jenny Saville standing in front of her artworks

Jenny Saville: Latent

In this video, Jenny Saville describes the evolution of her practice inside her latest exhibition, Latent, at Gagosian, Paris. She addresses the genesis of the title and reflects on the anatomy of a painting.

Jenny Saville, Pietà I, 2019–21, charcoal and pastel on canvas

Jenny Saville: A cyclical rhythm of emergent forms

An exhibition curated by Sergio Risaliti, director of the Museo Novecento, Florence, pairs artworks by Jenny Saville with artists of the Italian Renaissance. On view across that city at the Museo Novecento, the Museo di Palazzo Vecchio, the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, the Museo degli Innocenti, and the Museo di Casa Buonarroti through February 20, 2022, the presentation features paintings and drawings by Saville from the 1990s through to work made especially for the occasion. Here, Risaliti reflects on the resonances and reverberations brought about by these pairings.

A Jenny Saville painting titled Self-Portrait (after Rembrandt), oil on paper

Jenny Saville: Painting the Self

Jenny Saville speaks with Nicholas Cullinan, the director of the National Portrait Gallery, London, about her latest self-portrait, her studio practice, and the historical painters to whom she continually returns.

Jenny Saville’s Prism (2020) on the cover of Gagosian Quarterly magazine.

Now available
Gagosian Quarterly Winter 2020

The Winter 2020 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring Jenny Saville’s Prism (2020) on its cover.

News

Photo: courtesy the artist

Artist Spotlight

Jenny Saville

July 22–28, 2020

In her depictions of the human form, Jenny Saville transcends the boundaries of both classical figuration and modern abstraction. Oil paint, applied in heavy layers, becomes as visceral as flesh itself, each painted mark maintaining a supple, mobile life of its own. As Saville pushes, smears, and scrapes the pigment over her large-scale canvases, the distinctions between living, breathing bodies and their painted representations begin to collapse.

Photo: courtesy the artist

Jenny Saville

Video

Jenny Saville
Why Human Bodies Fascinate

On the occasion of her 2016 exhibition Erota at Gagosian Davies Street, London, Jenny Saville speaks with Channel 4 News about her fascination with bodies, her observations on gender, and being an observer.