take art: jenny saville

Thank you Manic Street Preachers for introducing me to the work of Jenny Saville. Saville\’s work adorned the cover of the Manic\’s masterpiece — The Holy Bible and it was the perfect compliment to the music that was contained within that cover — visceral and obsessed in so many ways by the human body. Saville is grouped in with the Young British Artists but is perceived to differ from them in that she has concentrated on figurative oil paintings. She is someone that I try to check in on every once in a while — ready to be stunned again by some powerful piece that seems to use the architecture of the body to express something that most would bury deep inside — these pieces all seem to emotionally charged that it almost leaps off the canvas at you. Her painting has something of stillness about it when you consider the subjects themselves but then you look at the brushstrokes and the whole enterprise is leant a sense of barely contained energy.

The pieces are beautiful — some may say not in the traditional sense, but they are being blinded by the subject matter and missing the artistry. Do the pieces have a dark heart? Maybe, but they have a deep soul too.

jenny saville at the gagosian gallery

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