Jenny Saville at Modern Art Oxford and the Ashmolean Museum

‘Cultural’ summers in Oxford tend to be narrated by group leaders, reliving the town’s history for summer schools and tourists, and are punctuated by Shakespeare plays on the college lawns.  So the unequivocal dynamism of the current display of British artist Jenny Saville’s works both at Modern Art Oxford and at the Ashmolean Museum (on until 16 September 2012) has therefore been particularly welcome.

Saville paints a lot of flesh and the flagrant frontality with which she does so is perhaps one of the reasons she is often compared with Lucian Freud. If you saw the National Portrait Gallery’s recent exhibtion of Lucian Freud Portrait’s you will remember the triptych of paintings of the ‘Benefits Supervisor’.

Lucian Freud, 'Benefits Supervisor Sleeping'

These kind of contours find their echo in Saville’s paintings.

The tone of Saville’s latest series of drawings, the ‘Reproduction’ series, strike a different chord. It is the palimpsests of images and themes from art history’s older players which call out from these. Forms from Picassos and Manets wink out from the wonderfully loose and exploratory drawings in the first room of Modern Art Oxford’s exhibition and the explicit referencing in Saville’s two drawings in the Ashmolean testify to her transcendent draughtsmanship.

Those in the renaissance room of the Ashmolean hang gracefully alongside the museum’s relatively new acquisition of Titian’s ‘Triumph of Love’ and the paintings of other Venetian legends. Notably, there is no jarring with such lofty neighbours. That period’s great exploration of the theme of the Madonna and Child is taken up in these incredible drawings and Saville draws on her own experience of motherhood. Saville’s expressive lines act as loose harnesses for her wriggling babes; the seeming reality of their dynamic with the formidable women from whose embrace they writhe, enables the theme of motherhood more generally to carry us through time, to the present day. It is quite a feat and the effect is, to repeat an aptly used word, monumental.

In his laudatory review of these exhibitions, Waldemar Januszczak berates the loss of Saville’s work to a selective, moneyed audience in the recent past and her consequent 'public' absence makes her ironically conspicuous amongst the crowd of her more media-happy YBA peers. These two exhibitions in Oxford are free and are inspiring viewing, go and see them!

It is really worth listening to Saville’s video interview in Modern Art Oxford too. She has a wonderful way with words and very easy voice. 

 

Modern Art Oxford has a little café which rolls on to the street which might be worth popping into after.