About this Book

One of the best young British painters working today, Jenny Saville's fleshy nudes give body to a grotesque excess often lost or covered up in our efforts to remain clean and our attempts at perfection. In Saville's work, bodies hang like meat, or take on the appearance of bloated corpses, or become surfaces for texts and maps; Saville points to a physical reality that is both more real and more immaterial than any of our attempts to describe it. Her subjects fill up the canvas, ready to spill over and burst out of the suddenly fragile frame of the artwork, imposing themselves on the viewer and offering no chance for escape. Accompanying a recent exhibition, this impressive monograph presents several of Saville's new paintings, including a painting of hermaphrodite Del LaGrace Volcano, who contributes a short essay to the book.