(Flesh) is all things. Ugly, beautiful, repulsive, compelling, anxious, neurotic, dead, alive. – Jenny Saville
Fascinated by the endless aesthetic and formal possibilities that the materiality of the human body offers, Saville remits a highly sensuous and tactile impression of surface and mass in her monumental oil paintings. In the compelling Stare paintings she renders 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 in 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. Jenny Saville, who was born in Cambridge, England, will be having her first solo U.S. museum exhibition at the Norton Museum in West Palm Beach, Florida later this year. And this september 15 the Gagosian Gallery in New York presents an exhibition, entitled Continuum, of recent paintings and drawings by Jenny Saville.
