Jenny Saville

The Anatomy of Painting

★★★☆☆

On until 7 September 2025

The premise of this exhibition is that to paint is to dwell in a very foreign language. “Painting” has a semiotic system, a grammar, and those are as fixed as they are changing. Artists may try to express ideas – like “the human form”, for example – in that second idiom, sometimes conforming to its turn of phrase, sometimes giving rise to altogether new concepts.

Saville tries to do both. She shapes her figures – larger than life, often female, and adorned in blemishes, fractures, sex – as the grammatical subjects in a tongue of violent morphology. But she also suggests, unwittingly but in contradiction, that the ferocity of her paint is not a given but a dialect.

Catching her work in its various states of composition (rather than decomposition, as one may imagine of, say, Bacon’s) suggests that the sexy brutality which Saville applies to her subjects is one step away from an affectation. There is no trace of the visceral in her gentle pencil studies, for example. The recent glitch paintings, likewise, are developments of a method. A translator might wonder, therefore, about the veracity of Saville’s native-tongue source story.


notes and notices are short and curt exhibition reviews. Read more:

Future Relics at Union Pacific ★★★★☆

Future Relics

★★★★☆

“Reskilling” has the same ring in art as “reindustrialisation” does in geopolitics.

Shu Lea Cheang at Project Native Informant ★★☆☆☆

Shu Lea Cheang

Scifi New Queer Cinema, 1994-2023

★★☆☆☆

With material this gratuitously explicit and a curator this absent, it’s a miracle that this project wasn’t shut down by the licencing, or indeed art-historical authorities.

Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum, It Will End In Tears at Barbican Curve ★★☆☆☆

Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum

It Will End In Tears

★★☆☆☆

With the right lighting, this story could be a mid-century colonial classic.

Will Gabaldón, Flicker at Union Pacific ★★★☆☆

Will Gabaldón

Flicker

★★★☆☆

Gabaldón reinvents the pastoral for the Instagram generation.

Tyler Eash, All the World’s Horses at Nicoletti ★★☆☆☆

Tyler Eash

All the World's Horses

★★☆☆☆

The artist must choose which ground is best ceded.

Wilhelm Sasnal at Sadie Coles ★★★☆☆

Wilhelm Sasnal

★★★☆☆

Only in flights of anger does this vision come close to becoming believable.

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