Jenny Saville. Erota

About

Gagosian Gallery is pleased to present "Erota," a group of recent drawings by Jenny Saville.

Over her twenty-five year career, Saville has taken the depiction of the human form in unprecedented directions. Her visceral embodiments confront issues of mortality while attesting to a tenacious formal engagement with the problems and innovations of both classical figuration and radical abstraction.

In the figures of large, sprawling nudes, inspired in part by "Titian to Canaletto: Drawing in Venice," a recent exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, Saville demonstrates her acute sensitivity to the problems and challenges faced by Old Masters—Rembrandt, Raphael, and Titian—while bringing a specifically modern sensibility to bear on classical drawing traditions. The shifting forms and multiple contours of her writhing and coupling figures—in oil stain, pastel, and charcoal on canvas—evoke a world in flux, consistent with the idea that no single reality or perspective can ever be definitive. These corporeal images are like landscapes that reveal themselves to the viewer in real time.

Saville's forceful marks suggest destruction, regeneration, and a cyclical rhythm of emerging forms, imparting eros, or life force, to her art.

Jenny Saville was born in Cambridge, England, in 1970. She lives and works in Oxford, United Kingdom. Her works are included in public collections such as The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Broad, Los Angeles; the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; and Saatchi Collection, London. Solo museum exhibitions include "Jenny Saville," Museo d'Arte Contemporanea, Rome (2005); "Jenny Saville," Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, Florida (2011–12, travelled to Modern Art Oxford in 2012); and "Jenny Saville: Drawing," Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, University of Oxford, United Kingdom (2015–16).

For further inquiries please contact the gallery atlondon@gagosian.com or at +44.207.493.3020. All images are subject to copyright. Gallery approval must be granted prior to reproduction.