Jenny Saville’s Depictions of Surgery and Images from Medical Books Cindy by Jenny Saville, 1993, via Christie’s SAVILLE: For me, the painting wasn’t just about her size—it was just about how beautiful she looked. Some people ask me, how can you think somebody like that is beautiful? But honestly, I just do. After witnessing all these strong reactions to the triptych, I became even more interested in bodies that some might see as “misbehaving,” whether through violence or surgery, or bodies that don’t have a fixed gender—that became a decade’s worth of my work, and in some ways, I’m still exploring that theme.

She received her BAFA (Fine Arts, Cum Laude) from the University of Pretoria in 2016 and is currently pursuing her MA in Visual Arts at the University of Johannesburg. Her work has been represented locally and internationally in numerous exhibitions, residencies, and art fairs. Attewell was selected as a Sasol New Signatures finalist (2016, 2017) and a Top 100 finalist for the ABSA L’Atelier (2018). Attewell was selected as a 2018 recipient of the Young Female Residency Award, founded by Benon Lutaaya. The volume is dedicated to the work of Jenny Saville (Cambridge, 1970), one of the greatest contemporary painters and a leading voice in the international art scene. Born in 1970 in Cambridge, England, Saville attended the Glasgow School of Art from 1988 to 1992, spending a term at the University of Cincinnati in 1991. Her studies focused her interest in “imperfections” of flesh, with all of its societal implications and taboos. Saville had been captivated with these details since she was a child; she has spoken of seeing the work of Titian and Tintoretto on trips with her uncle, and of observing the way that her piano teacher’s two breasts—squished together in her shirt—became one large mass. While on a fellowship in Connecticut in 1994, Saville was able to observe a New York City plastic surgeon at work. Studying the reconstruction of human flesh was formative in her perception of the body—its resilience, as well as its fragility. Her time with the surgeon fueled her examination into the seemingly infinite ways that flesh is transformed and disfigured. She explored medical pathologies; viewed cadavers in the morgue; examined animals and meat; studied classical and Renaissance sculpture; and observed intertwined couples, mothers with their children, individuals whose bodies challenge gender dichotomies, and more. GAY: I mean, some of that confidence is “fake it ’til you make it.” But at the same time, I have really strong boundaries, so if I’m being vulnerable, it’s something that I can handle being vulnerable about. When I wrote Hunger, I knew it would be met with cruelty. But I did it anyway. Torso (2004 – 2005) by Jenny Saville, oil on canvas; Diego Carannante from Rome, Italy, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia CommonsGAY: They don’t think that there is something to talk about beyond the identity of the artist. I think a lot of white people are afraid to critically engage with work by people of color because they don’t want to be perceived as racist if they don’t simply love it, which is so condescending—as if we can’t handle critique. We can and we do, every single day. JSI just automatically pull out forms. It’s an instinct I’ve got as part of my nature. I’ve found a way to work where there’s almost a fight between paint and image, and I like to work from the point of abstraction to the figure. GAY: Absolutely. Ten years ago, I collected data and found that nearly 90 percent of the books reviewed in the New York Times are by white authors. It’s so important to have hard numbers, because so many naysayers will only believe data. But we can’t just look at the data and say, oh, that’s terrible. Publishers need to respond—not just with editorial fellowships, but with permanent changes. Until they do, we’re going to continue to have these conversations. Diversity and inclusion are not my areas of expertise, but I’m forced to do this type of work because these egregious disparities continue to exist. Chrisél Attewell (b. 1994) is a multidisciplinary artist from South Africa. Her work is research-driven and experimental. Inspired by current socio-ecological concerns, Attewell’s work explores the nuances in people’s connection to the Earth, to other species, and to each other. She works with various mediums, including installation, sculpture, photography, and painting, and prefers natural materials, such as hemp canvas, oil paint, glass, clay, and stone.

Accompanying NOW is a group display drawn from the National Galleries of Scotland collection, including works by Oladele Bamgboye, Miroslav Balka, Alex Dordoy, Alexis Hunter and Francesca Woodman, until 22 May 2018. This will be followed by the Tesco Bank Art Competition for Schools, which opens on Saturday 26 May and runs until 16 September 2018. NCI was recently involved with a collection of essays on Jean-Michel Basquiat’s self-portraits, which have really been overlooked. I know you have a particular interest in him and his self-portraiture. SAVILLE: It’s also part of the branding. Identity becomes a way to sell or a way to promote the work, but it then acts as a veil between the audience and the work’s content. Edinburgh-based artist Catherine Street presents a new installation of works entitled A hoarding of greenery, a flow of redemption which explores the contrast between thinking and sensing and comprises a new single channel video, a text piece, a series of collages and a spoken-word performance, which will be staged by the artist during the run of the exhibition.

Jenny Saville is probably best known for her large scale oil paintings of fleshy, obese female figures. Saville’s work invokes a deep fascination in the palpability of flesh, extremities of anatomy, and the grotesque combined with a masterly and yet intuitive instinct for the handling of paint. She graduated from Glasgow School of Art in 1992 and was appointed as lecturer at The Slade School of Fine Arts, London between 2000 - 2006. GAY: I edited a collection of essays by myself and others called Unruly Bodies [for Gay Mag in 2018]. I think the bodies that challenge our cultural norms are always going to interest me. Jenny Saville is a current contemporary British artist who challenges the way that the female nude has been represented throughout art history. As Saville draws on the history of the nude, she challenges the male gaze by not depicting the typical idea of female beauty as smooth and petite, but rather as imperfect and unidealized. You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs. Compare Standard and Premium Digital here. SAVILLE: I just showed about half the works from my “Elpis” series at Gagosian in New York, and I’m finishing the other ones now. When I went to Moscow two years ago, I saw so many amazing women—like this waitress who had an incredible face. Eventually, I started asking people if they’d model for me, and rented a studio there. The series is based on the Russian female poet Anna Akhmatova, who wrote the bulk of her work in the ’30s and ’40s, under Stalin’s rule. Her husband was executed by the Soviet secret police, and her son was imprisoned. Every day, for seventeen months, she went to the prison where he was kept and saw all these other women who were walking around trying to find information about their loved ones. She couldn’t write anything critical of the government—had the work been found, she would have been arrested or executed—so instead, she whispered the poem she wanted to write into these other women’s ears. Between 1935 and 1961, she wrote Requiem, an elegy about her experience of waiting all those months to write the words down on a piece of paper. It wasn’t published until 1987. Reading about Akhmatova, I learned about all these amazing twentieth-century women writers in Moscow, while I was there photographing those Russian subjects for the paintings [a series of boldly colored portraits of various creative women working today].