Venice represents a place where art is an intrinsic part of everyday life and where the Biennale artists of today sit in dialogue with these great Venetian artworks. It’s a great honour to have the opportunity to exhibit in Venice.
Jenny Saville
This exhibition marks Jenny Saville’s return to Venice, a city she loves, has visited many times, and is rich in the work of the old Venetian masters that she has studied for many years. It is a huge honour to show Jenny Saville’s masterpieces at Ca’ Pesaro.
Elisabetta Barisoni
In the year of the Biennale Arte, the International Gallery of Modern Art at Ca’ Pesaro returns to contemporary voices with an extraordinary exhibition dedicated to one of the most important painters of our time, Jenny Saville. This is the first major exhibition of Saville’s work in Venice, and traces the development of her practice from the 1990s to the present day.
Born in 1970 in Cambridge, Saville attended the Glasgow School of Art from 1988 to 1992, spending a semester at the University of Cincinnati in 1991. During this formative period, her figurative paintings came to incorporate contemporary debates surrounding the body—with all the societal implications and taboos that they bring. It was also during her time in America that Saville encountered the work of New York painters like Willem de Kooning and Cy Twombly. Alongside her early dialogue with ancient sculptures, the Old Masters, and modern European figurative painting, she became interested in the fundamentals of painting that abstract artists explored.
Throughout the course of her career, Saville has maintained this exchange with the broad history of art. Her references extend from Egon Schiele to the masters of New Objectivity, from Cézanne to Picasso, reaching back to Rembrandt, Rubens, and above all Titian. Venetian painting, in particular, has become an essential touchstone of her art, both for its use of color and its rendering of texture. Saville’s dialogue with the Old Masters is never nostalgic, but serves to enhance her explorations of the body and of painting as a living language.
Generationally part of the group of painters and sculptors who made their mark between the late 1980s and early 1990s—often referred to as the Young British Artists (YBAs)—Saville revitalized contemporary figurative painting by reengaging with the sensualities and the raw potential of oil, while also raising questions about society’s perception of the body.
Over time, her work has evolved. The great monumental nudes of the 1990s, including Propped (1992) and Hybrid (1997), are joined in Venice by portraits that achieve great effects of light and color, such as Hyphen (1999), a double-portrait of Saville and her sister, and Reverse (2002–03), in which the face of the artist, reclined, is mirrored on the floor. Repeatedly, throughout these works, multiple bodies entwine, as figuration mingles increasingly with abstract and expressionist elements. In close-ups, color becomes freer, more intense, with brushwork moving swiftly like cursive script and culminating, in the 2020s, in profound coloristic exploration. Luminous glances and faces, some of them childlike, bear the names of subjects from mythology or literature, such as Ligeia (2020–21) or Song of Songs (2020–23), or simple, isolated substantives: Focus (2022–24), Gaze (2021–24), Rupture (2020).
Other recent works deal with themes that make a strong emotional and symbolic impact, such as war and collective grief. Inspired by news images that are still tragically relevant today, works such as Aleppo (2017–2018) and Saville’s various Pietàs do not recount a specific traumatic event. Rather, they transform suffering into a universal image, one capable of speaking to all ages through a composition that is rooted in the classical tradition yet maintains a great emotional intensity. These paintings do not seek consolation, but address the reality of the body and the human condition without filters, continually pushing the pictorial matter to its limits.
As further evidence of the dialogue that connects Saville to Italian art, and Venetian art in particular, final room of the exhibition presents previously unseen work created by Saville for Ca’ Pesaro, in homage to the lagoon city. The exhibition becomes a sublime celebration of the strength and power of the artist’s love for and devotion to painting, while also serving as an intimate and grand tribute to the city of Venice—confirming the city’s role as a living center of cultural innovation.
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