Jenny Saville has been recognized as one of the most thought-provoking and technically accomplished talents of her generation, known for her monumental paintings of fleshy nudes. Fascinated by the endless aesthetic and formal possibilities that the materiality of the human body offers, Jenny Saville remits a highly sensuous and tactile impression of surface and mass in her monumental oil paintings. She captures the contours and features of the face and the nuances of skin texture and color in strokes both bold and meticulous. Enlarging the facial features of her human subjects to a vast scale and rendering them in layer upon layer of paint, she imbues them with a sense of mass and weight that is almost sculptural and at times wholly abstract. Intense pinks, reds, and blues erupt through pale skin tones, disclosing the internal workings of the painting like the flesh and blood of a living organism. Continuum includes monumental paintings and drawings from her recent exhibition held at Gagosian Gallery in New York as well as highlights from the past six years of the artist’s work, which have not been exhibited or published.
About the Author:
John Richardson is the author of a multivolume biography on the life of Picasso. He is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and Vanity Fair.
