Jenny Saville
Artist
Jenny Saville
Title
Rosetta 2
Medium
oil on paper laid on board
Size
98 x 72.8 in. / 249 x 185 cm.
Year
2005 - 2006
Description
oil on paper mounted on board Executed in 2005-06.
Jenny Saville • Jenny Saville was born in Cambridge, England in 1970. She had great success at her show at the Saatchi Gallery in 1994, which generated a great deal of publicity for her work (the images were everywhere that year). • By 1994 many people were familiar with Saville's massive paintings, such as Plan, in which a naked woman is seen from below, her body filling the canvas through a combination of physical bulk and extreme foreshortening. Contour lines, like those that define the changes in altitude of land masses on a map, are drawn across the surface of the woman's skin. • She currently lives and works in Oxford, England. • Her work has a emotional impact as the people are almost ‘spilling out of the painting’ • A lot of her work tackles the idea of beauty and that we envisage ourselves as fatter than we are. • She almost dares you to disapprove of it or dares you to dislike it which can be compelling
Quotes “Bodies fascinate me. I find having the framework of a body essential. Having flesh as a central subject, I can channel a lot of ideas. ” --Jenny Saville “What is this thing, the body, her paintings ask, when it is stripped bare, denuded of personality and context, this thing that seems so much a part of us, and which we try so hard to look after and yet which betrays us, decays from within, and which, when it leaves us, takes us with it?” "It's all things. Ugly, beautiful, repulsive, compelling, anxious, neurotic, dead, alive." And it is nothing. "Eventually we expel ourselves. We rust away. Our own body rejects us. I don't find that tragic."
"There is in everybody. We are taught to judge ourselves from a very young age, to groom ourselves." And this creates a neurosis for women, she says. "You see this dichotomy in women's magazines all the time: an article on breast cancer empowering; an article on skin products that make you look younger - neurotic."
JENNY SAVILLE & GLEN LUCHFORD Closed Contact #14, 1995-1996 C-print mounted in Plexiglas 72 x 72 x 6 inches (182.9 x 182.9 x 15.2 cm) Ed. of 6
Jenny Saville Closed Contact #8, 1996
Analysing Artists work • Respond • Explore • Further research
• “De Kooning is my main man, really, because he just did everything you can do with paint. He reversed it, dripped it, scraped it. But I want to hold on to a certain amount of reality” • “If we continue to speak in this sameness, speak as men have spoken for centuries, we will fail each other again.”