International Art News

JENNY SAVILLE Red Stare Head IV, 2006-2011 Oil on canvas 99 3/16 x 73 13/16 inches (252 x 187.5 cm) © Jenny Saville 2011. Courtesy of Gagosian Gallery Photo by Mike Bruce

From September 15 to Saturday, October 22, 2011- Gagosian Gallery – Madison Avenue
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.

Saville portrays the intimate relationship between mother and child in a series of life-sized drawings directly inspired by Renaissance nativity portraits — in particular Leonardo da Vinci’s cartoon The Virgin and Child with St. Anne and John the Baptist, an atypical scene in which the Virgin contends with a lively Christ-child. In Study for Pentimenti IV (After Michelangelo’s Virgin and Child) (2011), and Componimento inculto (2011), the subjects – a pregnant woman and young child– are recorded in symbiotic flux. Multiple impressions of each figure are drawn, erased, and superimposed again to create studies in simultaneity; the relationship between them is expressed in a series of dynamic poses rather than in static compositions of iconographic order. Through these intricate studies, Saville gives powerful graphic life to the anatomical details and expressive movements that animate and underpin her visceral paintings.

Jenny Saville was born in Cambridge, England in 1970. She studied at the Glasgow School of Art. Her work has been included in exhibitions worldwide including “Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection,” Royal Academy of Arts, London (1997, traveled to Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin and the Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York 1998-1999); “The Nude In 20th Century Art,” Kunsthalle Emden, Germany (2002, traveled to Arken Museum of Modern Art, Copenhagen in 2003); “Painting,” Museo Correr, 50th Biennale di Venezia (2003); “Paint Made Flesh,” Frist Center for the Arts, Nashville (2009, traveled to the Phillips Collection, Washington, DC and Memorial Art Gallery, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY in 2010) and “Eroi,” Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Torino, Italy (2011). Her work was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rome in 2005. Her first solo U.S. museum exhibition will open at the Norton Museum in West Palm Beach, Florida later this year.

Gallery Hours

February 5 to May 15, 2011 – Kunstforeningen Gl Strand – Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art
As a tribute to the widely renowned artist Louise Bourgeois, who recently passed away, GL STRAND shows a selection of her newest works in gouache on paper and her sculptures. The focal point being the relationship between mother and child, raises central questions about femininity, sexuality and isolation. These topics are embedded in rituals embodied by the relationship between the father, the mother and the child.
Louise Bourgeois was born in Paris in 1911. She studied art at various schools there, including the Ecole du Louvre, Académie des Beaux-Arts, Académie Julian, and Atelier Fernand Léger. In 1938, she emigrated to the United States and continued her studies at the Art Students League in New York. Though her beginnings were as an engraver and painter, by the 1940s she had turned her attention to sculptural work, for which she is now recognized as a twentieth-century leader. Greatly influenced by the influx of European Surrealist artists who immigrated to the United States after World War II, Bourgeois’s early sculpture was composed of groupings of abstract and organic shapes, often carved from wood. By the 1960s she began to execute her work in rubber, bronze, and stone, and the pieces themselves became larger, more referential to what has become the dominant theme of her work—her childhood. She has famously stated “My childhood has never lost its magic, it has never lost its mystery, and it has never lost its drama.” Deeply symbolic, her work uses her relationship with her parents and the role sexuality played in her early family life as a vocabulary in which to understand and remake that history. The anthropomorphic shapes her pieces take—the female and male bodies are continually referenced and remade—are charged with sexuality and innocence and the interplay between the two. Bourgeois’s work is in the collections of most major museums around the world. She lived in New York, where she passed away in May 2010.
The Exhibition is created in collaboration with Nordiska Akvarellmuseet. All photos: Courtesy of Cheim & Reid, Hauser & Wirth/Copyright Louise Bourgeois Trust

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