at the National Portrait Gallery, London.
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This is the second post on this exhibition. You can see the first post here . As I always do, I have included the introduction from the first post here. If you want to skip it, then scroll down to Mothers and Children.
I first saw the work of Saville in Oxford in 2012, and I was immediately a fan. Four years later, there was a small exhibition of some of her work at the Gagosian in London, which I also went to see. So, I was very pleased to be able to see more than 50 of her works at the National Portrait Gallery last year.
One of the most important contemporary artists, a colossus, Saville has played a leading role in the reinvigoration of figurative painting. Her unique ability to create visceral portraits from thick layers of paint reveals an artist with a deep passion for the process itself.
First of all, flesh is the main subject in Saville's work. 'Flesh is all things. Ugly, beautiful, repulsive, compelling, anxious, neurotic, dead, alive', Seville has said. Also: 'I don't give my figures a setting. They are never in a room. There is no narrative. It's flesh, and the paint itself is the body'. What is so striking is the sheer physicality of it: her painting of skin is violent, painful, bruising. 'I have to really work at the tension between getting the paint to have the sensory quality that I want and be constructive in terms of building the form of stomach for example, or creating the inner crevice of a thigh. I want a painting realism. I try to consider the pace of a painting, of active and quiet areas. In my earlier work my marks were less varied. I think of each mark or areas as having the possibility of carrying a sensation'.
The second point to make is their size. Her paintings need to be seen 'in the flesh', so to speak. They are huge, overwhelming. Sometimes nine feet tall. Most of them depict the body covering the whole of the canvas and sometimes spilling over the edges and this adds to the drama - her nudes particularly, push towards the viewer rather than being safely contained within the frame of the canvas. So that you are not looking at a body, you are becoming part of that body, that skin. The whole experience becomes overwhelming. 'A large female body has a power; it occupies a physical space, yet there's an anxiety about it. It has to be hidden', she said in an interview.
The size of her paintings is a major departure from convention. Charles Darwent comments that historically, 'one genre of painting that has not by and large lent itself to large-scale treatment has been the female nude. Given the need of male viewers to reinforce their masterly role by looking at things smaller than themselves, oversized pictures of women were clearly a bad idea'. By coungtering expectations of the genre, Saville is achieving a critique of a time-honoured practice. The large scale of the paintings is empowering the figure depicted and thus challenging perceptions of the female nude as the object of male desire.
Thirdly, a lot of the women Saville paints are nudes. About painting the naked female body, she has said: 'It is hard sometimes. I was a staunch feminist; I still am. So, in those days (the 90s) to paint a female nude was - well, what are you doing? But early on I learnt that I'm most effective when I address something directly. I want to trespass on every area that is a no-go for women, because that'll open it up and make it free'.
Saville should have no qualms about painting the female nude. She is doing so, but differently. Saville has attempted and succeeded in deconstructing female 'nature' as fabricated by patriarchal discourse, seeking to reappropriate the female figure. By shifting the female body's position as an object of male delectation, and thus deconstructing the male fantasy projected for centuries on it, she is able to question the female body's representation throughout art history. As Helen Cixous has stated, in our phallocentric society there lies the necessity to produce the meaning of woman.
The fourth point about her work, is the brushstrokes. Developing her own vocabulary of techniques, by using blurred abstract brushstrokes and layered sculptural marks, Saville creates movement and energy. She describes this as enabling her 'to change the paint with sculptural force' which 'embeds an inner tension and life force to the painting'.
When Saville graduated from Glasgow School of Art in 1992, Charles Saatchi purchased the whole of her degree show, erasing her debt, and he asked Saville to make paintings to fill his gallery.
To me, these later works are not as impactful as her early ones: there is no real sense of fleshiness, or depth. Also, again, there is no eye contact. But, it's more than that - it's the way I respond to them.
Mothers and Children:
Saville is one of the few female artists to address with such directness the theme of the intimate relationship between mother and child. Saville explained: 'People used to say: you can't make paintings about children, it'll destroy your career, it'll be chocolate-box, saccharine. But it's a profound thing to give birth: I didn't want to ignore it, I wanted to navigate it, address it straight on'. The results are tender, loving, hesitant.
Drawing allowed Saville to create dynamic tangles of lines suggesting the movement of bodies and offered a type of layering that helped embed memory into the paper and raw canvas.
Digging II, 2015
Saville has talked about the total freedom that children have, 'scribbling across paper, the way they paint without any need for form. I thought: I fancy a bit of that myself'.
Interlocking figures:
No glorious flesh, no challenging gaze here but sculptural formations of entwined bodies. 'I've learned that spontaneity is important when working with models, especially groups of bodies, because when people interact, they create forms that I couldn't imagine before they arrive in my studio'.
Also: 'I built the figures thinking about sculptural form. It's an organic process, developing one figure after another until the mass of humans have a solidity. It's one of my favourite ways of working'.
Couples Study, 2016-17, (pastel and charcoal on paper)
Compass, 2013, (charcoal and pastel on paper)
Pieta I was made in response to Michelangelo's unfinished marble sculpture, alongside which it was first shown in the Museo dell'Opera del Duomo, Florence in 2021. Saville described the experience as 'the project of my life as an artist. I thought Michelangelo was a genius before I did this project, but now my admiration for him is a lot deeper. For instance, the Pieta sculpture: every angle, every fold of cloth, every turn of a wrist was used to create emotional depth, without sentimentality. It is a difficult road to walk, to condense humanity without it becoming a cliche. That's what I've learned from what he did'.
Back to colour:
The final room of the exhibition is full of colour. The heads on display are in reds and blues, yellows and greens. Before the pandemic, Saville went to Moscow, and while there, she 'kept seeing these fascinating faces'. The outcome was that she hired a photographic studio and began taking lots of pictures. In the studio, she found a variety of coloured backdrops, so she began working for the first time with a red background.
These recent works are also much influenced by digital technology. The final few works, including Stanza, are collages, created by overlaying multiple digital images, focusing on the space between layers, and the results are the most bravely abstract yet. Saville said: 'I tried to make something that embodies form and formlessness simultaneously... That's very difficult to do in paint, to make it have absolute, solid form in a recognised way and complete abstraction. It's a ridiculous aim really, but the work is a document of that endeavour'.
Latent, 2020-22, (acrylic and pastel on canvas)
'Latent Space' is a concept in artificial intelligence that refers to the analysis of hidden structural similarities between visual data. Saville draws on this idea as she builds form out of abstract passages, making visible a transition from nature to culture. There are heads within heads in this painting as a blue section of a previous portrait is revealed from underneath.
Using a range of pastels and thin, transparent paint, Saville's process in this work involves weaving together colours to construct the structure of the model's face. There is a soft rendering of the neck creating luminosity, combined with wider strokes of pastel giving a sense of movement.
Rupture, 2020, (acrylic and oil on linen)
Drift, 2020, (oil and oil stick on canvas)
Messenger, 2020-21, (acrylic and oil on canvas)
Lovely rainbow in this painting
Cascade, 2020, (oil on linen)
Prism, 2020, (pastel and charcoal on canvas)
Cascade, 2020, (oil on linen)
Virtual, 2020, (oil on canvas)
In Chasah, a biblical term meaning to seek refuge or protection, we see Saville's continuing exploration of bold colours and lines that combine to create convincing sculptural form and illumination of flesh.
Starting from an abstract base, Saville built the form of the head out from this, leaving liminal areas as a fresh way to look at the notion of positive and negative space in a portrait. There is a sensuality to the way she has painted the mouth and teeth.
There is a tiny reflection of the painter in the model's eye.
Stanza, 2020-22, (oil and oil stick on linen)
Eve, 2022-23
Stanza, 2020-22, (oil and oil stick on linen)
In Stanza, Saville articulates a process she has developed in which she allows an image to reveal itself by knitting together stencilled layers of paint. By placing specific importance on the space between the layers, she focuses on the creative function of instinct and possibility. She says: 'I wanted to see if I could make an almost abstract portrait, pivoting between a portrait of painting and a painting of a head'.
In Eve Saville experiments with allowing drips of yellow painting to run down the canvas, over the open eyes, mingling like sweat and tears,
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