Jenny Saville Rosetta 2 Analysis

Jenny Saville and Lucien Freud share the same subject matter i.e. the human form however both have very different approaches to recording their observations and ideas and it’s an approach that I’ve become accustomed to because I like it as it allows absolute freedom in artistic expression.
Saville produces large-scale pieces of work and uses impasto in a similar way to Freud however notably less thick and blockier. She chooses to work in such a way as she wanted ‘people to know what it is they're looking at. But at the same time, the closer they get to the painting; it's like going back into childhood. And it's like an abstract piece... it becomes the landscape of the brush marks rather than just sort of an intellectual landscape’ this way of working is prominent in the painting ‘Rosetta 2’. The formidable scales of the paintings are awe-inspiring and really capture the eyes of the viewer. Using oils, she makes highly pigmented work, employing a
Produced in 1995, the collaboration produces some exciting and bizarrely beautiful work. Commenting on the work and her intentions she says ‘the boundary of our bodies, which we presume is so fixed and can only exist in that certain area, can be extended so far. This movement, malleability of flesh, I started to think about that quite a lot’. ‘Closed Contact no.4, fig (vi)’ Photographed from an elevated angle through a glass plate, shows Saville contorting her body whilst pressed up against Plexiglas. The piece definitely is appropriate to her intentions as she manages to distort her body enough so that we have no clear visual point of reference; there are no “boundaries”. I appreciate this image because she has abstracted herself and pushed her body to extremes also its very different from her paintings there are no definitive lines instead folds of flesh frame the image that is what I like