The New Yorker:

The British painter has dedicated her career to depicting human flesh, especially that of women, with deep empathy.

By Rebecca Mead

In March, an exhibition of works by Jenny Saville, the British artist known for her large-scale figurative paintings, went on display at the Albertina Museum, in Vienna. The day before the opening, Saville visited the galleries to inspect the completed hang. The show, titled “Gaze,” included several works in which Saville had sought to explore the fractured experience of life in the digital era. “I have had a fascination for quite a while now with how we live these different realities,” she explained. “If you sit on a bus or take the subway, everybody’s on a device. So you’ve got this sort of mundane, lived reality, and then this screened reality. If you’ve got twenty people on the subway train, those twenty people are probably all over the globe, or even in outer space. Those realities exist all the time. You just move in and out, seemingly seamlessly.”

We looked at a series of three paintings, titled “Fates.” Each depicted a woman seated in a chair mounted on a stone plinth. They had been completed in 2018, and at the time, Saville told me, she “had been looking at images of ancient goddesses.” The figures had the monumentality of classical sculpture, but they lacked the corporal integrity expected from such forms. In “Fate 2,” the figure sat with her right leg cocked, her foot balanced on the opposite knee—but there was also a third leg, which hung over the arm of the chair. The figure’s midsection was scrambled into colored marks, a belly button indicated by a scrawl of black on pink. “Fate 3” also depicted a female body, but with a pregnant belly and pendulous breasts, her intimidating scale exaggerated by the viewer’s lowered vantage point. A pair of legs was tucked beneath her, while a third haunch and leg extended to her right. The surfeit of limbs suggested the temporal and spatial layering of experience which has become central to the way we see and live today. The “Fate” paintings conveyed an impulse toward motion, capturing the restlessness inherent in a human body—particularly a body that is building up the flesh and blood and bone of another body within its own. The paintings offered technically accomplished realism—Saville can paint a puckered nipple so lifelike that it makes you want to turn up the heat—combined with gestural abstraction. Her female figures were large in their art-historical scope as well as in their scale, evoking not just the classical tradition but also canonical modernist works by Pablo Picasso and Willem de Kooning.

Go to link