Dec 9, 2020

ARTIST - Artist of the day : Jenny SAVILLE

Jenny Saville, born in Cambridge on May 7, 1970, is a British painter. She is a leader of the Young British Artists (known as "YBA"). Living and working in Oxford, she is best known for her monumental nude images. In 2018 she became the most highly rated living female artist in the world.

Influenced since her youth by the masters of Renaissance such as Rembrandt, Tintoretto, and then during her studies by Picasso, Francis Bacon, Cindy Sherman, cosmetic surgery as a map drawn on skin and in the sense of "repairing a body"...

Bodies she represents tell us a story, they are open books, deeply graphic anatomies. On these faces, we can read boredom, sadness, provocation, pride... These models are never those that society prescribes to us; they are imperfect, sometimes out of norm, they resemble us, we are indifferent, perhaps disgusted, move us, hurt us... It reflects a very contemporary human creature, isolated and in need of affection, tormented by corporal obligations of current society.

In spite of everything, these bodies are not defeated, they assert themselves and return forms and colors to the eyes of those who spy on them in the street as well as in front of the canvas, they are poetic and can evoke memories to the voyeur that we are.

The beginnings of Jenny Saville were very marked by a feminist and protest approach that sought to detach itself from the phallocentric social model in representation of the female body. A model that subjects women to a particularly coercive representation of themselves.

In her approach to gender and representation of the female body, Jenny Saville has, by her own admission, been greatly influenced by Cindy Sherman, conceptual artist who questions through photography and "happening" representation of women in modern society.

One of Jenny Saville's first works, Propped (1992), is very representative of this trend. Indeed, this canvas of imposing size and unusual in the register of female nude represents a woman, rather obese, perched on a very high and wiry stool where the model seems to be in a precarious balance. Dissonance of the masses and exaggerated receding lines accentuate imposing and almost intimidating allure of the model. Framing is seen from below and this monumental woman with her excessive body and flesh is looking down on us in a confident manner. Model's face - as will often be the case thereafter - is that of Jenny Saville.

By being a painter and a model at the same time, she wants to break the logic of objectification of female's body by being a model and a portraitist. She thus proclaims her commitment in this reterritorialization/ The painter quotes a sentence of Luce Iragaray, a famous feminist writer. Text is this: "I we continue to speak in this sameness, speak as men have spoken for centuries, we will fail each other again." It is thus well question of re-appropiation of female's body by women themselves.

Source: art and photography magazine "Artfields" and interview with SFAI (San Francisco Art Institute)

Among works in our collection at Artothèque Sud Nîmes, we have artists who deal with the woman body, the mother or the bodies linked, intertwined ... such as Salvador Dali or Porcja Vladimir.

Salvador Dali, Spanish born in Figueres in 1904 is surely the most emblematic artist of surrealist movement. Painter, sculptor, engraver, scriptwriter and writer, this Spanish prodigy of art approached in his works mainly subjects such as dream, sexuality, edible, his wife Gala and religion. Although he was an important and symbolic figure of 20th century, he irritated a part of art world, which did not appreciate his totally atypical and very complex character. Then considered as a figure of surrealism, his artistic movement colleagues tried to expel him from it. Indeed, known to be in majority communists, they do not appreciate fascination that Dali carried for Hitler and his fascist regime.

It was then that the "father of surrealism" André Breton, ordered his expulsion denouncing him "to be guilty of counter-revolutionary actions involving the glorification of Hitler's fascism".

Dali's mustache was part of his image. He even published a book containing 28 iconic images of them. Finally, it was after his exhumation in 2017 that experts realized artist's mustache had remained intact since his death in 1989. They described it as "still in its 10:10 position."

Source: Artsper