Gender and art

This exhibition brings together the expressionistic oeuvre of the Austrian artist Egon Schiele (1890 –1918) and works by the British painter Jenny Saville (b. 1970), for a fascinating dialogue between the virtuoso exponent of Viennese Modernism and a contemporary artist. The exaggerated, obsessive depiction of corporality compels the viewer to engage directly with the act of painting as a physical medium.

Egon Schiele - Jenny Saville

10 October 2014 – 25 January 2015

Kunsthaus Zürich

Exhibition website :

http://www.kunsthaus.ch/schiele/?lang=en

Jenny Saville, Dusk, 2014

Gagosian is presenting the first-ever solo exhibition of Jenny Saville’s paintings in London.

Captivated by the endless aesthetic and formal possibilities of the materiality of the human body, Saville makes a highly sensuous and tactile impression of surface and mass in her monumental oil paintings. Subjects are imbued with a sculptural yet elusive dimensionality that verges on the abstract. In recent paintings, she renews her enduring figurative investigations by depicting bodies embracing and intertwined.

Several new works are inspired by the ancient Egyptian rubbish dump at Oxyrhynchus, one of the most important archeological sites ever discovered. Heaps of discarded documents and literature, incredibly preserved in the area’s dry climate, are now invaluable; fragments of ancient Greek texts such as Euclid’s Elements and the poems of Sappho are among the excavated papyri. Saville alludes to this history through a deep layering of paired subjects: faces, torsos, and limbs overlap with shadows and reflections, palimpsests of living bodies and ancestral apparitions.

Jenny Saville. Oxyrhynchus

June 13 - July 26, 2014

Gagosian Gallery, London

http://www.gagosian.com/exhibitions/jenny-saville--june-13-2014