In Florence, a major exhibition project dedicated to Jenny Saville in the city's major museums

From September 30, 2021, to February 20, 2022, Florence will welcome in an exhibition project conceived and curated by Sergio Risaliti, director of the Museo Novecento, promoted by the City of Florence, organized by MUS.E and supported by Gagosian, one of the leading painters on the international contemporary art scene-Jenny Saville (Cambridge, 1970). The project will be developed in collaboration with some of the city’s major museums: the Museo di Palazzo Vecchio, the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, the Museo degli Innocenti and the Museo di Casa Buonarroti. The exhibition will display paintings and drawings from the artist’s 1990s as well as works made especially for the occasion.

Saville transcends the boundaries between figurative and abstract, between informal and gestural, transfiguring the chronicle into a universal image and putting the figure, be it a body or a face, back at the center. She left postmodernism behind to reconstruct a close dialogue with the great European painting tradition in constant confrontation with the modernism of Willem de Kooning and Cy Twombly and the portraiture of Pablo Picasso and Francis Bacon.

The exhibition highlights the strong correlation between Jenny Saville and the masters of the Italian Renaissance, particularly with some of Michelangelo’s great masterpieces. Certain data emerge, such as the monumental size of the paintings, a distinctive feature of the artist’s figurative language since the early years of her career, as well as her research focused on the body, the flesh, and on female subjects who are nude, mutilated or crushed by weight and existence.

A remarkable series of paintings and drawings will be exhibited in the halls of the Museo Novecento, about a hundred medium- and large-format works covering a span of time from the early 2000s to these last months. A showcase facing the square will be open in the museum’s external loggia, always visible, with a large-format painting displayed above the altar inside the former Spedale church, a monumental portrait of Rosetta II (2000-06), a blind young woman known to the artist and portrayed as a blind cantor or mystic in ecstatic concentration. A comparison strongly desired and sought by the museum director with Giotto ’s wooden Crucifix suspended in the center of the nave of Santa Maria Novella, clearly visible from outside the churchyard when the Dominican basilica’s portal is open.

Palazzo Vecchio’s Salone dei Cinquecento will display the major monumental work, Fulcrum (1998-99), which consecrated Jenny Saville with her first solo exhibition, held Gagosian Gallery in 1999. The large painting dialectically enters into antithesis with the masterpieces assembled in the Hall of Battles. Formally, Jenny Saville’s work intends to present a confrontation with the language of sculpture, given the monumental dimensions of its images and the strong plasticity of the figures. Fulcrum shows three bodies lying prone, indeed from the flesh and poorly distinguished faces and individualities of the two women and the young girl, forced into an embrace with dramatic overtones.

Saville’s passionate and engaging dialogue with Michelangelo’s works and iconography reaches its climax at the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo. Here, in the room where Buonarroti’s Pieta Bandini is kept, a large-format drawing, about three meters high, that the London-based artist began working on after a site visit to Florence two years ago, will be on display. The smooth, shiny body of the Christ of Michelangelo’s Pieta find in Saville’s drawing Study for Pieta (2021) a natural counterbalance animated by the intense gazes of the characters holding up a young boy, a victim perhaps of political or ideological barbarism. Avoiding the identification of space and time, drawing the figures without recognizable clothing and signs regarding social, political, ethnic belonging, Saville declares the condemnation of all human violence, making the theme of pietas, the experience of mourning and mourning speak with dramatic signs.

The conception of the female figure in relation to motherhood is encapsulated in the two paintings on display in the Pinacoteca of the Museo degli Innocenti. Between Luca della Robbia’s Madonna and Child and Botticelli’s Madonna and Child with an Angel, Jenny Saville’s large painting The Mothers (2011), with its strong evocative impact, reveals the timeless short-circuit of this theme, welcomed in a building where, since the time of Brunelleschi’s project, the need for a commitment to the care of abandoned children and the promotion and protection of children’s rights has been felt. A second large-scale drawing will be exhibited here, Byzantium (2018), a different version of Pieta in which the graphic work accompanied by color interventions seems not to have stopped in search of the right pose, following the movement of the bodies.

In the rooms of Casa Buonarroti the artist’s drawings, Study for Pieta I (2021) and Mother and Child Study II (2009) present a conscious homage to Michelangelo’s drawings and sketches. There is no shortage with paintings such as Aleppo (2017-18) and Compass (2013) of themes dear to Saville’s poetics, strongly linked to the contemporary. Drawings of strong emotional impact dialogue with one of Buonarroti’s most famous works on paper, namely Mother with Child of about 1525. Complementing this dialogue are two earthen sketches, one attributed to an artist in Michelangelo’s circle and the other to Vincenzo Danti, a small-scale reproduction of the Medici Madonna, as well as a pair of small Michelangelo inventions for a Transfiguration and an Etruscan cinerary urn.

To construct his images, Saville collects photographs and clippings from newspapers and catalogs, mixing art history and archaeology, scientific and news images, without creating hierarchies between beauty and abjection, brutality and venality, tenderness and cruelty. Her subjects belong to the classical tradition: faces, nude bodies, groups of several figures, reclining or standing figures, motherhood and pairs of lovers presented in poses reminiscent of Etruscan statuary or classical models from the Renaissance and modern traditions, Egyptian or archaic art.

Image: Jenny Saville, Study for the Eyes of Argus, detail (2021, colored pencil on watercolor paper). © Jenny Saville. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates. Courtesy the artist and Gagosian.

In Florence, a major exhibition project dedicated to Jenny Saville in the city's major museums

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