Jenny Saville: Gaze

The Young British Artists (YBAs) seem to be having something of a renaissance: there are two major Tracey Emin shows this year, at the Yale Center for British Art and the Palazzo Strozzi, as well as exhibitions of work by Sarah Lucas, Damien Hirst and others associated with the group – while last year the Royal Academy dedicated a retrospective to Michael Craig-Martin, one of the YBAs’ most influential forerunners. Now comes an exhibition of work by Jenny Saville at the Albertina, her first show in Austria, focusing on the act of looking (21 March–29 June). Saville is well known for her paintings of the human body, which frequently flirt with abstraction, cubism and the grotesque, and many of those portraits and nudes from the 1990s to today are on display here. But the show also draws out Saville’s debt to art history, showing works that refer to Old Masters, Christian iconography and the ancient world, such as Byzantium (2018), a bracing riff on the traditional format of the Pietà.

Preview below | View Apollo’s Art Diary
Find out more from the Albertina’s website