Jenny Saville

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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. Edinburgh-based artist Catherine Street presents a new installation of works entitled A hoarding of greenery, a flow of redemption which explores the contrast between thinking and sensing and comprises a new single channel video, a text piece, a series of collages and a spoken-word performance, which will be staged by the artist during the run of the exhibition. GAY: They don’t think that there is something to talk about beyond the identity of the artist. I think a lot of white people are afraid to critically engage with work by people of color because they don’t want to be perceived as racist if they don’t simply love it, which is so condescending—as if we can’t handle critique. We can and we do, every single day. GAY: The equation is probably different for art than it is for literature. Only wealthy people can buy unique artworks by major artists. There are a lot more readers. SAVILLE: It definitely makes me reflect on how important artistic freedom is—not just having it, but exercising it. Had I been born fifty years earlier, I probably never would have been taken seriously as a woman artist. No gallery would have signed me on. So I want to take advantage of the moment I live in.

Saville draws upon a wide range of sources in her work, including medical and forensic text books, children’s drawings, graffiti and online images, as well as celebrated paintings and drawings of the past. In more recent years, Saville has created works in which she layers images, often drawing on several different sources. Working between the figurative and abstract, she has chosen to use charcoal and pastel in many of these works, attracted by the transparency they offer. These materials allow Saville to work organically, layering and erasing her media to blend and merge bodily forms and abstract gestures. The resulting works, such as One out of two (symposium) (2016), capture a sense of motion and fluidity. These restless images provide no fixed point, but rather suggest the perception of simultaneous realities. 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.” Saville understands and manipulates paint in a way which describes flesh in a visceral and tangible way yet managing to retaining the materiality of the medium. However she remains focussed on the intention to represent driven by her internal reference to subject matter through paint. Jenny Saville: “I have to really work at the tension between getting the paint to have the sensory quality that I want and be constructive in terms of building the form of a stomach, for example, or creating the inner crevice of a thigh. The more I do it, the more the space between abstraction and figuration becomes interesting. I want a painting realism. (Schama, n.d.)JSThe late pastels—they just fly. I mean, Degas can be seen as this straightforward artist who painted dancers, and people see him as quite an academic artist. But if you just stand in front of those late pastels and look: that color is broken up. It’s absolutely majestic. Small sections can be like a Willem de Kooning painting. And he did that because those pastels come in incredible colors. 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.

This Jenny Saville self-portrait is considered one of the most important paintings created by a British artist in the last 30 years. In this painting, Saville portrays herself in a way that challenges the male gaze and breaks down traditional representations of the female nude. This monumental painting shows the artist sitting down in the nude, balancing on a kind pedestal, and staring down at the viewer. In this way, the body yet again resembles a landscape, and in this work, in particular, Saville referred to the painting as a “gender landscape”. NCOn Picasso and Cubism, there’s also his incredible, very late self-portrait from 1972, the year before he died. NCYou’ve mentioned to me in the past how you like to be surrounded by your older works, and in a similar way, you have these walls of incredible image sources that have inspired you around your studio: everything from old master paintings through to graffiti to abstract art like Cy Twombly’s. How do these references serve your work?

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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. JENNY SAVILLEIt’s in the tradition of works of mine like Ruben’s Flapand Fulcrum [both 1999], where there are these different sections. The whole painting is made from a series of selfie photographs. It’s a play between the photographic and painterliness. SAVILLE: Would you really? I was watching a video of you speaking at the 92nd Street Y in New York, and wow, you’ve got the best thighs I’ve ever seen! We can get together after this stupid virus is over. I’m so excited. 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.