Jenny Saville's First Venice Exhibition Announced.

4 hours ago7 min read3 comments

The announcement that British painter Jenny Saville will mount her first-ever exhibition in Venice is not merely a gallery show; it is a profound moment of arrival, a long-overdue coronation for an artist who has fundamentally reshaped the discourse around the female form in contemporary art. For decades, Saville’s monumental, fleshy canvases have operated with the visceral impact of a Caravaggio, eschewing idealized beauty for a raw, unflinching exploration of corporeality, gender, and the very nature of paint itself.To see her work descend upon Venice, a city synonymous with the grand historical pageant of art—from Titian’s lush colorism to the explosive gestures of the AbEx painters who inform her practice—is to witness a powerful dialogue between the old master tradition and its most vital contemporary inheritor. The context is everything: this is not an artist being discovered, but one being properly situated within the pantheon.Saville, a key figure associated with the Young British Artists (YBAs) and championed early by Charles Saatchi, has long commanded staggering prices at auction, her work ‘Propped’ achieving a landmark $12. 4 million in 2018, setting a record for a living female artist.Yet, the critical establishment has sometimes been slower to grant her the institutional reverence afforded to her male peers. A Venetian exhibition, in its hallowed halls and amidst its biennial frenzy, functions as a powerful institutional seal of approval, a recognition that her investigations into the body are as conceptually rigorous and historically significant as they are visually arresting.One can imagine her vast, painterly terrains of flesh—which often evoke the physicality of de Kooning’s women while subverting the male gaze—commanding the cavernous spaces of a Venetian palazzo, their scale demanding a physical and psychological encounter that smaller galleries cannot contain. The exhibition promises to be a retrospective in spirit, if not in name, tracing her evolution from the early, confrontational nudes that challenged cosmetic surgery and societal pressures, to her more recent, almost archaeological explorations of the fragmented body, inspired by Greco-Roman sculpture and the visceral reality of C-sections.This Venetian outing will force a re-evaluation, placing her not as a sensationalist of the flesh, but as a modern-day Rubens, a painter for whom the materiality of oil paint is inextricably linked to the materiality of the human body. It is a homecoming for an artist whose work has always been in conversation with the European canon, and its impact will ripple far beyond the canals, cementing Saville’s legacy not just as a market phenomenon, but as one of the most important and transformative painters of our time.

#Jenny Saville

#Venice exhibition

#landmark show

#British painter

#art news

#featured

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