Jenny Saville a Ca’ Pesaro | Gagosian Quarterly

Why It Matters

Saville’s Venice‑rooted practice shows that deep engagement with art history can generate fresh visual language, reinforcing the market’s appetite for works that bridge past and present.

Key Takeaways

• Saville draws on Venetian masters to inform contemporary figurative oil
• She references Titian’s brushwork, merging limbs for tactile visual poetry
• New works reinterpret mythic narratives like Venus‑Adonis using gold oil bars
• Exhibition layout mirrors historic Venetian architecture, enhancing intimate viewing
• Saville sees Venice’s artistic evolution—from mosaics to canvas—as creative catalyst

Summary

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.

Original Description

In this video, Jenny Saville sits down inside her first major exhibition in Venice to discuss how the great Venetian artists of the past and the city’s heritage influence her work. Titled "Jenny Saville a Ca’ Pesaro," the show brings together more than thirty canvases and works on paper from the 1990s to the present, tracing the development of her practice, which is deeply rooted in the history of painting: https://on.gagosian.com/4esm976

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Artwork © Jenny Saville; video by Maco Film; photography of Titian’s "Assumption of the Virgin (Assunta)" by Matteo De Fina

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