by I recently went to Jenny Saville: the anatomy of painting in the National Portrait Gallery and the exhibition raved about teenagers. Equipped with notebooks and sketchbooks that signed words such as “expressive”, “brave” and “beautifully”, the prospective art enthusiasts of Saville’s portraits seemed enthusiastic: from cozy back and wounded faces to colossal close -ups of girls and fleshy naked women. I spoke to an art teacher and her sixth formers and we discussed how Saville’s body is the antithesis of the idealized forms that we see online today. And how stunned we were through the landscape of the textures that can exist within a single cheek.
The seventeen-year-old Laurence-Die drawings with a ballpoint pen-admired man-made the “chaotic side” of Saville’s work and was fascinated by “how much emotion she could represent in one picture”. His 17-year-old classmate Georgia was attracted to her “lively colors” and felt “positively overwhelmed” by the paintings, especially supported paintings, an exposed early self-portrait that was part of the Glasgow School of Art Degree of the artist. A naked saville that merges beauty and brutality, a softness and sharpness sits on a precarious -looking stool (rising in her ankle) with bitten nails that steal violently into her skin.
Related: Portraits that are so powerful that they overwrite reality – Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting Review
Take a closer look and you will see that the painting with text (written backwards) is overlaid, which is: “If we continue to speak in this equality – speak how men have spoken for centuries, we will fail.” It is a translation from the essay of the French feminist Luce Irigaray from 1980, when our lips speak together, and is not only based on the importance of art history that does not repeat (by excluding and excluding them), but – more – today – about the mistakes of the current leaders.
“It is really inspiring for young women in art to be controversial,” said Georgia. “It also makes them safer in their ability and appearance because they see that Saville creates it in a beautiful painting.” Frustrated about how “inaccessible” artist for women in history and ask why men are covered up with a fig leaf, while women are often completely exposed, she said: “If [a self-portrait like this] Is made by a woman, she emphasizes herself – they are women who take back control. “
Georgia’s words brought me back to my own experiences as a teenager with Saville, which I studied in the early 2010s as part of my GCSes. I remember that my class comrades and I with printing our faces against glass windows (undoubtedly reluctant to from our mothers) came to school, which distort our features such as Savilles in 2002 closed contact self-portraits, which was made with the photographer Glen Luchford. The works full of expression and the expression of our young people we have afraid of how portrait like our lives, broken, broken, emotionally, could be indiciously worlds from the gilded images that we have often seen in museums, or the airbrush photoshoots in magazines.
But only now, in this show, was I able to understand the monumental effects of their pictures. Not only in challenging ideas of beauty in a patriarchal world, but in their ambition, color and charcoal, in their fascinating drawings – to bring new limits to face, breastfeed and challenge themselves.
Regardless of whether it is a bloody face that is examined under a light white light, bodies that fade from life directly in front of us, or their truthful insights into motherhood, Saville’s works are in a way that confirms the power of painting in a world overtaken by senseless scripts. It was that I also discussed with the teenagers, whose clever observations felt so encouraged in this turbulent world what art can offer us.
However, these precious youthful discussions could become a rarity, thanks to the constant reduction of the government in art education. As described in the latest expenditure check, the total exit of the department for culture, media and sport will be reduced by 1.4% in the next three years. Studies show that only 38% of the students take at least one humanities (statistics that falls to 24% in art compartments). As a result, we experience a crisis when it comes to creative people with lower socio -economic backgrounds.
Incredibly, Saville’s exhibition is free for everyone from the age of 25 thanks to a private donor. I hope this will encourage young people with all the backgrounds, to step into these rooms and to feel welcome to discuss, debate and return again – and to understand the raw, visceral power that can have painting and arts.
