It takes a lot to really blow my socks off. This weekend I was more blown away than I have been in a LONG time by a painting. I finally took the long overdue trip to the Brooklyn Museum to see the Feminist Show (Remix!) and had my fist experience with Ms. Saville. I knew her work but I had never seen one in real life. I just stood there- start struck, truly in awe and totally geeking-out. “Jenny Saville, known for big paintings of big fleshy nudes, seems to have learned that paint has a life of its own,” Roberta Smith from the New York Times explains, “Saville's general strategy is to exaggerate the age-old artistic obsession with the female nude -- reflected in Titian, Rubens, Rembrandt and Ingres, for example -- to extremes of imposing wall-like massiveness, where the body's and the painting's surface become one.” At only 29 her work is impressively mature, her painting has an exciting freshness, as well as superb sense of color and space. “[Her paintings] are artistic cadavers being both dissected and reconstructed in a process that links different paintings or parts of paintings to photography, sculpture and abstraction, as well as suggesting darker analogies like surgery, deformity and torture,” explains Smith. She truly is one of the most exciting contemporary figurative painters, and she has a long career to look forward to.
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