Jenny Saville: Oxyrhynchus, Gagosian Gallery

For the first London Jenny Saville exhibition, Gagosian Gallery shed a new light on the practice of the prolific contemporary figure painter 

Then

Jenny Saville came onto the art world in the early 1990s - a time when she was sorely needed. Obsessively depicting huge fleshy female nudes, she fulfilled a need for monumental oil paintings of the human figure at a time when a slick one-liner conceptualism (aka. Damien Hirst) ruled the consensus. Bought and championed by Charles Saatchi, Saville appeared in the Royal Academy’s seminal 1997 exhibition Sensation! Here critics likened her to Lucian Freud and Rubens. Saville appealed to those who felt that art’s heart remained in painting, without pushing a retrogressive ‘back to paint’ conservatism. Instead she championed the idea of painting as a mode of inquiry - a new way of seeing.

Now

Over the years Saville has become incredibly collectable, indeed, she’s up there was one of the most expensive living painters. Now with big-hitting Gagosian Gallery, she is having what is strangely her first (and long overdue) solo exhibition in London. Two years ago she had stunning retrospective in Modern Art Oxford, the success of which will undoubtedly be surpassed in the capital. 

The exhibition 

Whilst Saville is best know for her huge figure-based oil paintings – for some an unparalleled contemporary master in this genre and medium  – this show introduces us to new directions that her work has taken, where figures merge with backdrops inspired by both photographs and Renaissance paintings. Disembodied limbs and silhouettes merge and layer over one another, blurring the lines between figuration and abstraction. There are a series of works inspired by an ancient Egyptian rubbish dump, the Oxyrhynchus of the show's title, where intriguing relics of the past were perfectly preserved in the dry desert heat.  We see Saville also moving away from oil paint towards a mixed media of charcoal and pastels. Here the arabesque curves of the human body are rendered atop washes of colour, creating great depth. 

Gagosian’s space can be slightly intimidating for audiences: huge white boxes that somehow diminish the visitor. But this format shows Saville’s work well and they really command the space. Furthermore, these works have a presence and a quality of surface that doesn’t translate into reproductions; you must see them first hand!