Jenny Saville at Modern Art Oxford Review

Cambridge born artist and graduate of Edinburgh College of Art, Jenny Saville has graced Oxford, with the privilege of hosting her first ever solo exhibition in the UK.  With a beautiful yet unnerving aura, Saville traces back her practice from the early nineties to the present in the well-lit, warm environment of Modern Art Oxford (MAO).

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.

 Jenny Saville at Modern Art Oxford till 16.09.2012