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Lot Essay
At over three metres tall Jenny Saville's Juncture provides a daunting encounter with the landscape of the human body. Painted in 1994, the year Saville was rapidly propelled to fame as one of Britain's leading young artists, this cramped and cropped image of a female head and torso is filled with flesh, its monumental scale provoking an intense, all-exclusive relationship between painting and viewer. This compositional device is a deliberate decision on Saville's part, whose treatment of large nudes challenge powerful underlying expectations about both art and the body.
"Its the effect of intimacy through scale that I want," she has stated. "Although large paintings are so often associated with grandeur, I want to make large paintings that are very intimate. I want the painting to almost surround your body when you stand very close to it. Rothko creates an intimacy through scale. When you stand very close to his paintings the colour hums and vibrates through you it - almost wraps around you. It's a childlike feeling... I want the feeling that you don't only command the piece of work, the piece of work also commands you" (Saville quoted in M. Gayford, "A Conversation with Jenny Saville", in Jenny Saville Territories, exh. cat., New York, 1999, p. 31).
Saville's work is perhaps most often compared to Lucian Freud's rigorous studies of the human body, and while at first glance a certain artistic similarity may indeed be discerned, there is a broad conceptual gap separating the two artists. Saville takes on Lucian Freud's politic of the gaze, yet her own celebration of form and flesh confronts our worst anxieties about corporality and gender. The robust physicality of Saville's sensuous, painterly practice is coupled with her awareness of identity politics, and of feminist art in the tradition of Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger and Kiki Smith. Conceptually driven, and based in the world of photography, this massive painting of a massive body reclaims the female figure from the male-orientated artistic tradition, transforming an unflinching representation of the blotched and blemished flesh of a real woman into something enigmatically beautiful and sumptuous.
"Its the effect of intimacy through scale that I want," she has stated. "Although large paintings are so often associated with grandeur, I want to make large paintings that are very intimate. I want the painting to almost surround your body when you stand very close to it. Rothko creates an intimacy through scale. When you stand very close to his paintings the colour hums and vibrates through you it - almost wraps around you. It's a childlike feeling... I want the feeling that you don't only command the piece of work, the piece of work also commands you" (Saville quoted in M. Gayford, "A Conversation with Jenny Saville", in Jenny Saville Territories, exh. cat., New York, 1999, p. 31).
Saville's work is perhaps most often compared to Lucian Freud's rigorous studies of the human body, and while at first glance a certain artistic similarity may indeed be discerned, there is a broad conceptual gap separating the two artists. Saville takes on Lucian Freud's politic of the gaze, yet her own celebration of form and flesh confronts our worst anxieties about corporality and gender. The robust physicality of Saville's sensuous, painterly practice is coupled with her awareness of identity politics, and of feminist art in the tradition of Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger and Kiki Smith. Conceptually driven, and based in the world of photography, this massive painting of a massive body reclaims the female figure from the male-orientated artistic tradition, transforming an unflinching representation of the blotched and blemished flesh of a real woman into something enigmatically beautiful and sumptuous.