Jenny Saville

Product Information

This beautifully produced monograph is an important addition to the library on one of the world's most influential and enduring living painters.

I even like the obscurity of parts of the poem that have unraveled throughout my life when reading other books and ancient myths. Right up there with Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud in her ability to splash daring observations and passions on huge canvases, she has already establish a 'look' that is unmistakable.Perhaps the next monograph, and there surely will be one as Saville continues to grow and mature, will give us more new work. It has a lot of footage of his studio in the Hamptons, and of him looking back through his archive and discussing his life and painting. The publication was designed to accompany the exhibition of painter Jenny Saville at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. When I was last in Florence, Casa Buonarroti had an exhibition of Michelangelo’s correspondence, so when lockdown happened I thought that reading his letters would be a good way to spend the time. Jenny Saville is the subject of an exhibition project conceived and curated by Sergio Risaliti, director of the Museo Novecento, in collaboration with four other major museums in Florence: Museo di Palazzo Vecchio, Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, Museo degli Innocenti, and Museo di Casa Buonarroti.

The articles accompanying this monograph are excellent as well -- and not nearly disturbing as the images. This is the opulently printed hardbound catalogue produced in conjunction with the 2002 Gagosian Gallery Beverly Hills exhibition of collaborative photographs by Jenny Saville and Glen Luchford. Printed on good quality paper, this book gives you an insight in to her working process as well as reproducing some of her work. It sounds sickeningly romantic but you get used to a sort of sense of failure, even if it’s a kind of optimistic failure that makes you carry on. Covers are lightly soiled, scuffed and rubbed, with minor wear to edges - rubbing, slight creasing at corners.

Through these letters, you follow Michelangelo going to Rome at the age of twenty-one and corresponding with his father about sending him his drawings, problems with marble shipments due to bad weather, money troubles, and a nun who claims to be family and wants financial support. British-born painter Jenny Saville’s fascination with the nude female body is clearly illustrated in the tactile, fleshy, sensual oil paintings she produces in massive scale. This much-anticipated volume unites new work with many of Saville's paintings and drawings to date, accompanied by essays that explore Saville's continuing fascination with the human body within a broad art-historical context.