Jenny Saville, Hyphen, 1999, oil on canvas, 108 × 144 inches (274.3 × 365.8 cm) © Jenny Saville
Anselm Kiefer Uraeus
GAME CHANGER Each issue we look at a particular painting that influenced the course of contemporary art. Here is Jenny Saville’s Hyphen (1999). Text by Derek Blasberg. 152
In 1999, t went y-nine-year-old Jenny Sav ille debuted an exhibition of paintings called Territories in her first ever solo show in New York, at Gagosian’s Wooster Street gallery. This specific work, Hyphen, a gargantuan canvas that’s twelve feet long, commandeered the space, overflowing in its fleshy, corpulent textures off the wall and into the viewers’ laps. (One review described Saville’s style: “She seems less an easel painter than a maker of baroque billboards.”) The painting is a selfportrait of the artist with her sister, perhaps as children and perhaps as Siamese twins. In Vogue in May 1999, Dodie Kazanjian characterized Hyphen
as something “you don’t forget,” and said of the group, “They’re tough, challenging, disturbing, and strangely beautiful pictures. Only a woman could have painted them.” From this show onward, Saville helped to rewrite the art world’s narrative of the nude, pulling from Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud before her but creating her own genre, which was similarly graphic and baroque but also feminine and light. As Kazanjian put it, these are “mountainous, monstrous, pungently physical bodies, whose swollen volumes assault the eye, the mind, and the senses, not to mention 400 years of Western Art History.”
Presented by Gagosian Organized by Public Art Fund and Tishman Speyer May 2–July 22, 2018 Channel Gardens at Rockefeller Center®, New York
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