Published on the occasion of Jenny Saville: Elpis, an exhibition of new portraits by the artist at Gagosian, New York.

Between 1999 and 2002 he wrote, presented, and filmed the fifteen-part A History of Britain for BBC Television.Join Gagosian for a conversation between Jenny Saville and art critic and author Martin Gayford in conjunction with the exhibition Friends and Relations: Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach, Michael Andrews opening at Gagosian, Grosvenor Hill, London, on November 17. As well as reading his books, I watch his interviews on YouTube and his references always lead you somewhere interesting — whether it’s a piece of music, a debate about the human need for tragedy, a passage from Shakespeare or Montaigne. It sounds sickeningly romantic but you get used to a sort of sense of failure, even if it’s a kind of optimistic failure that makes you carry on.

She explored medical pathologies; viewed cadavers in the morgue; examined animals and meat; studied classical and Renaissance sculpture; and observed intertwined couples, mothers with their children, individuals whose bodies challenge gender dichotomies, and more.British-born painter Jenny Saville’s fascination with the nude female body is clearly illustrated in the tactile, fleshy, sensual oil paintings she produces in massive scale. Not that Saville was the first painter to dwell on the massively/morbidly obese female (Freud's 'carcasses' were startlingly new, Haneline Rogeberg has painted the full figured female for years, etc), but her superimposition of surgical alteration and disease states together with the painterly style of describing flesh are startling and awe inspiring. Collecting material from pathology textbooks, plastic surgery manuals, chronicles of injuries and burns and similar publications, Saville often adds an observational perspective to her work by attending surgery demonstrations and visiting butcheries. This exhibition asks open-ended questions about self-fashioning, cultural memory, gender identity, and the performance of identity. Saville had been captivated with these details since she was a child; she has spoken of seeing the work of Titian and Tintoretto on trips with her uncle, and of observing the way that her piano teacher’s two breasts—squished together in her shirt—became one large mass.

For the third episode of the online event series Gagosian Premieres, Jenny Saville will celebrate her exhibition Elpis at Gagosian New York with painter Nathaniel Mary Quinn and historian Simon Schama, with a performance by the Aaron Diehl Trio, who will play music by Philip Glass as well as a new composition inspired by the work on view. Gayford also spoke with the artist about her works in the exhibition Jenny Saville: Latent at Gagosian, rue de Castiglione, Paris. The multipart exhibition places Saville’s paintings and drawings in dialogue with masterworks of the Italian Renaissance, including some of Michelangelo’s greatest masterpieces, offering a revealing encounter between the contemporary and the historical.

Saville has specialized in subjects on the margins of society: the obese, the disfigured, and transsexuals; yet under her fluctuating light and painstaking hues and layers, her subjects transcend their strangeness to take on a universal quality. One of the exhibition sites is Casa Buonarroti, a museum that houses an astonishing collection of Michelangelo’s drawings and sculptures, as well as archival documents related to his life. This exhibition, curated from the Hill Collection by Karel Schampers, examines the human body through figurative work from the last five hundred years. Saville has specialised in subjects on the margins of society: the obese, the disfigured, and transsexuals; yet under her fluctuating light and painstaking hues and layers, her subjects transcend their strangeness to take on a universal quality. The publication was designed to accompany the exhibition of painter Jenny Saville at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art.

Unfortunately these were smaller on the page than necessary, but the quality of the images were excellent. There are literally thousands of books on Michelangelo, as alongside what he produced, his epic life and struggles make for a good story.In her depictions of the human form, Jenny Saville transcends the boundaries of both classical figuration and modern abstraction. I find the shock value of some of the subjects a little old, but have no problem because the pure application of paint and line is so very beautiful. Saville’s paintings refuse to fit smoothly into an historical arc; instead, each body comes forward, autonomous, voluminous, and always refusing to hide. Jenny Saville has been described as a New Old Master for the technical proficiency of her oversize nudes that have earned her comparisons to the likes of Lucian Freud.