Jenny Saville: “Prism”, 2020
©Jenny Saville. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates
Jenny Saville: ‘Elpis’ at Gagosian Gallery Gagosian presents ‘Elpis’, an exhibition of new paintings by Jenny Saville. This exhibition marks the reopening of the gallery at 980 Madison Avenue following the pandemic-related shutdown in March. November 12 – December 22, 2020.]]>
Source: Gagosian Gallery
Saville’s monumental portraits explore the human body and its fascinating aesthetic potential. Her bold and sensuous impressions of surface, line, and mass oscillate between rational and irrational forms, capturing a unique kind of realism specific to the twenty-first century. Titled after the ancient Greek personification of hope left behind at the bottom of Pandora’s box—a spirit traditionally associated with the burdens of human suffering, rather than positivity—the paintings in Elpis are grounded in tangible realities while reaching toward their mythological dimensions.
Though resolutely of its time, Saville’s art speaks to a profound reckoning with the primordial lineage of humanity. The ancient world comprises one of her most enduring sources of inspiration. In the past, she has presented the human figure as classical sculpture, melding marble and flesh through a complex layering of body parts and transhistorical artistic tributes. In the massive canvases presented at her 2014 solo exhibition Oxyrhynchus at Gagosian, Britannia Street, London, Saville intertwined palimpsestic silhouettes and fleshly forms, alluding to the trove of documents and literature that lay dormant in the famed titular Egyptian archeological site for millennia.
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