Art Videos

Jenny Saville a Ca’ Pesaro | Gagosian Quarterly

Jenny Saville’s latest show at Ca’ Pesaro, presented in Gagosian Quarterly, positions the British figurative painter within Venice’s centuries‑old tradition of oil painting. She emphasizes the city’s unique continuity—from wall mosaics to canvas— as a living laboratory for her practice. Saville cites Titian and Tintoretto as technical and conceptual touchstones. She describes climbing the scaffolding of Titian’s ‘Assumption of the Virgin’ to study brush marks, and adopts his late‑career technique of allowing paint to merge edges, creating a “foggy” inter‑lacing of limbs. Her new series, ‘Venus and Adonis’ and ‘Danaë,’ translates Ovidian myths using gold oil bars that weave through flesh, echoing the luminous palette of Venetian masters. The exhibition’s layout follows the Baroque palace’s rooms, pairing large canvases with grand salons and intimate drawings with windowless chambers. Saville notes the building’s former residential function adds intimacy, while references to Byzantine mosaics and Torcello’s heritage inform works like ‘Byzantium.’ These spatial decisions reinforce the dialogue between historic architecture and contemporary content. By marrying historic technique with modern narrative, Saville demonstrates how contemporary figurative painting can remain commercially and critically vital. The show underscores Venice’s role as a catalyst for artists seeking to fuse heritage with present‑day cultural commentary, a model likely to influence future museum programming and high‑end collectors.