Jenny Saville

Gagosian is pleased to present Ekkyklema, an exhibition of new paintings and works on paper by Jenny Saville. The project’s title refers to a wheeled platform that was used to move interior scenes into the audience’s view during antique productions of Greek tragic drama and alludes to the artist’s search for a pictorial language with which to confront our simultaneous occupation of material and screen-based worlds. Ekkyklema is also concerned with the moment and mystery of conception—a truly universal subject.

Saville’s new work was inspired in part by the giant digital display screens employed at stadiums and other major event venues, the scale and visual power of which generate an overwhelming, almost religious spectacle. Throughout the exhibition, the artist compartmentalizes body parts into angular screenlike panels whose hard edges and clustered arrangements recall desktop computing’s windows and menus and the boxed-in talking heads of news broadcasts. The artist evolved this pictorial system over the past year, focusing on our intersecting physical and electronic realities by combining figuration and abstraction. “I gave myself the challenge of feeling the ancient and digital worlds simultaneously,” she writes.

The reclining figures in Saville’s new paintings allude to the Greek mythological character of Danaë, whose child, it was prophesied, would kill his grandfather, Acrisius. Zeus visited the imprisoned Danaë in the form of a shower of gold, and from their union, Perseus was born—who later fulfilled the prediction. Rembrandt famously produced a monumentally scaled depiction of Danaë reclining on a bed and many other artists, including Titian, Artemisia Gentileschi, and Gustav Klimt, have also painted her. Saville drew the works’ palette from watercolor studies, produced over the past two years, of the changing light and colors of the Greek sky at sunset.

Finally, the works in Ekkyklema recall fragmented portraits by Pablo Picasso. The connection is an appropriate one since Saville made numerous studies in preparing the paintings—as Picasso did before working on paintings such as Guernica (1937). Her subjects are further complicated by active lines of intense color that suggest frenzied motion, while the compositions’ overlaid “screens” evoke the multiple perspectives characteristic of Cubism, interrupting her images of single and plural nude figures with partial views that offer fragmented glimpses of past, future, or alternative realities.

Born in 1970 in Cambridge, England, Saville attended the Glasgow School of Art from 1988 to 1992, spending a term at the University of Cincinnati in 1991. Her studies focused her interest in “imperfections” of flesh, with all of its societal implications and taboos. Saville had been captivated with these details since she was a child; she has spoken of seeing the work of Titian and Tintoretto on trips with her uncle, and of observing the way that her piano teacher’s two breasts—squished together in her shirt—became one large mass. While on a fellowship in Connecticut in 1994, Saville was able to observe a New York City plastic surgeon at work. Studying the reconstruction of human flesh was formative in her perception of the body—its resilience, as well as its fragility. Her time with the surgeon fueled her examination into the seemingly infinite ways that flesh is transformed and disfigured. She explored medical pathologies; viewed cadavers in the morgue; examined animals and meat; studied classical and Renaissance sculpture; and observed intertwined couples, mothers with their children, individuals whose bodies challenge gender dichotomies, and more.

A member of the Young British Artists (YBAs), the loose group of painters and sculptors who came to prominence in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Saville reinvigorated contemporary figurative painting by challenging the limits of the genre and raising questions about society’s perception of the body and its potential. Though forward-looking, her work reveals a deep awareness, both intellectual and sensory, of how the body has been represented over time and across cultures—from antique and Hindu sculpture, to Renaissance drawing and painting, to the work of modern artists such as Henri Matisse, Willem de Kooning, and Pablo Picasso. In the striking faces, jumbled limbs, and tumbling folds of her paintings, one may perceive echoes of Titian’s Venus of Urbino (c. 1532), Rubens’s Christ in the Descent from the Cross (1612–14), Manet’s Olympia (1863), and faces and bodies culled from magazines and tabloid newspapers. Saville’s paintings refuse to fit smoothly into an historical arc; instead, each body comes forward, autonomous, voluminous, and always refusing to hide.