Saville has gained a prosperous
reputation in the States following the success of her show at the Saatchi
Gallery in 1994 yet due to her keen attraction to a figurative opus, was not
necessarily deemed ‘fashionable’ among the painting world. Perhaps this
explains the delay for a solo exhibit, yet Saville felt that the time had come
to display in the city where she fabricates her work “I feel it is the right
time to show in this country and this is a beautiful museum with wonderful
daylight."
The
exhibition takes a reverse chronological approach to displaying Saville’s
pieces with her most recent works in the downstairs entrance of MAO. The
layered nude portraits take inspiration from the artist’s experience of
motherhood and capture the concept of shifting time and movement.
With a stimulus of the Renaissance Virgin and
Child the gestural pieces demonstrate her incredible skills as a craftsman and
artist.
Meanwhile upstairs, Saville’s earlier
works, such as the ‘Stare’ series, explore areas such as the
boundaries between states of the body, medical and social categorisation, and
life and death give a slight unsettling feeling, yet the sheer talent cannot be
denied. It’s no surprise that works such as the 16ft-wide ‘Fulcrum’ took
two years to accomplish. The upstairs leads onto Saville’s preliminary paintings that rose her to fame
in the nineties for demonstrating and implying the marking and restricting of
the female form. The colour scheme of the oil paintings and Saville’s brushwork
captures the shapes and contours of the female body with beauty and opulence.
The basement of MOA host a film
interview with Saville herself, allowing guests the opportunity to get a real
understanding of the artist’s mind. In the discussion, Saville talks about
individual pieces, such as ‘Torso 2’, that she worked on to ‘channel the
feelings of being human into an animal carcass.’ She explains the project captured her
inspiration for being ‘a mass of masculinity’, dissimilar to her other works
which exude femininity.
While her work is not something
you would necessarily want to wake up to in the morning, it cannot be denied
that Saville’s practice is executed with great skill and emotion. MOA has
accomplished a great task in hosting her first solo exhibition, and I would
very much recommend going to see the collection composed as one while you can!
And while in Oxford city, two of Saville’s recent works inspired by Leonardo’s
The Burlington House Cartoon, can be found a short walk away resting in the
Italian Renaissance space of the Ashmolean Museum.
