Jenny Saville by Richard Calvocoressi
Thirteen years after her first Rizzoli monograph, British artist Jenny Saville releases this much-anticipated volume--her most comprehensive to date--including many never-before-published paintings. One of the most renowned living figurative painters of our time, Saville has set auction records and her highly sensual canvases invite us to consider the female form in all its glory. Great artists are of their moment, but push boundaries to revitalize our world. The British artist Jenny Saville is best known for painting monumental close-ups of large nude women exposing things that are usually left unshown: flab, fat, bulge. Today, when the body has never mattered more or counted less, Saville is undoubtedly the painter for our times. Saville has specialized in subjects on the margins of society: the obese, the disfigured, and transsexuals; yet under her fluctuating light and painstaking hues and layers, her subjects transcend their strangeness to take on a universal quality. Among artists of her generation, Saville is unusual in her devotion to figurative painting. This much-anticipated volume unites new work with almost all of Saville's paintings and drawings to date, many of them unpublished works. Published in association with Gagosian Gallery, the book also features a complete and illustrated chronology of the artist's career. A conversation with acclaimed American photographer Sally Mann, and essays by art critic Mark Stevens and Gagosian Director, London Richard Calvocoressi complete the volume.