The most comprehensive monograph to be published on figurative painter Jenny Saville, one of feminism's most celebrated living artists whose monumental portraits continue to question our accepted ideals of beauty and disrupt the boundaries of race, gender, and identity. Thirteen years after her first Rizzoli monograph, British artist Jenny Saville releases this much-anticipated volume--her most comprehensive to date--including many never-before-published paintings. One of the most renowned living figurative painters of our time, Saville has set auction records and her highly sensual canvases invite us to consider the female form in all its glory.
Great artists are of their moment, but push boundaries to revitalize our world. The British artist Jenny Saville is best known for painting monumental close-ups of large nude women exposing things that are usually left unshown: flab, fat, bulge. Today, when the body has never mattered more or counted less, Saville is undoubtedly the painter for our times. Saville has specialized in subjects on the margins of society: the obese, the disfigured, and transsexuals; yet under her fluctuating light and painstaking hues and layers, her subjects transcend their strangeness to take on a universal quality. Among artists of her generation, Saville is unusual in her devotion to figurative painting. This much-anticipated volume unites new work with almost all of Saville's paintings and drawings to date, many of them unpublished works. Published in association with Gagosian Gallery, the book also features a complete and illustrated chronology of the artist's career. A conversation with acclaimed American photographer Sally Mann, and essays by art critic Mark Stevens and Gagosian Director, London Richard Calvocoressi complete the volume.
Jenny Saville received her B.A. Honors Fine Art from Glasgow School of Art, Scotland. Saville's works are featured in several public collections, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Broad, Los Angeles; and Saatchi Collection, London. Richard Calvocoressi is a director and senior curator at Gagosian Gallery, London. Previously, he was director of the Henry Moore Foundation and director of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh. Sally Mann's photographs have been the subject of major exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, and the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Her work can be found in many collections, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Mark Stevens is the former art critic of New York magazine. He is coauthor, along with Annalyn Swan, of the 2005 Pulitzer Prize-winning de Kooning: An American Master. Lauren Mahony organizes special exhibitions for Gagosian. She previously worked in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
