Jonathan Malesic at Commonweal:
The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth’s exhibition “Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting,” on view through January 18, 2026, begins dramatically. As I ascended the stairs to the show, I saw two monumental heads rise on the wall ahead of me. One head tips back, the other forward. The portrait is of two young women, cheek to cheek. Their heads seem at first to share a body—but no, one rests her chin on the other’s hunched-up shoulder. The left head looks down through narrowed eyes. The right, almost cherubic, looks off to the side, eyes and mouth open. Their faces are marred with red spots; a piece of flesh beneath an eye appears missing, exposing a smattering of scarlet over crude primer. The painting, Hyphen (1999), is twelve feet by nine feet. I approached it and shuddered.
Widely celebrated for reinventing the reputedly dead genre of figurative painting, Saville portrays bodies and faces—nearly all of them women—on large canvases and without context. The scale of a work like Hyphen permits the image to dissolve and resolve multiple times at various distances. From far off, the two girls’ eyes and hairlines are strikingly realistic. Delicate bluish veins appear on a forehead.
more here.
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