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Francis Bacon, Jenny Saville, and Albert Oehlen

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Francis Bacon, Jenny Saville, and Albert Oehlen

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Francis Bacon and his partner dying, and the impact that this had on him. Jenny Saville becoming a Mother and Albert Oehlen his friend dying.

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A Masterclass in Portraiture by Francis Bacon, Jenny Saville and Albert Oehlen

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A Nigerian artist that migrated to America and how this cross cultural influence changed her.

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Njideka Akunyili Crosby on painting cultural collision

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Ben Quilty- "CAPTAIN KATE PORTER, AFTER AFGHANISTAN"

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Ben Quilty- "CAPTAIN KATE PORTER, AFTER AFGHANISTAN"

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Ben Quilty captures a female soldier after returning from the Afghanistan War.

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Ben Quilty is one of Australia's most visible and most recognisable contemporary artists - known equally as well for his numerous humanitarian activities as for his ambitious impasto paintings. Quilty first came to attention for his images dealing with the risk-taking behaviour that he and his young male cohort would engage in - excessive drinking, drug-taking and dangerous driving in particular.

Emblematic of his social conscience, some of these car-themed works also intersected with Quilty's long-held interest in ways that white Australia has continued to appropriate Aboriginal cultures. His paintings of the Holden Torana and Monaro - models that were then popular among his daring and delinquent friends - were in part chosen for their use of language. ¹
RELATED: Margaret Olley RELATED: Ben Quilty
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Shortly after winning the Archibald Prize with his portrait of the late, much-loved painter Margaret Olley, Quilty toured with Australian troops in October 2011 as part of the Australian War Memorial's Official War Art Scheme. By his own admission, Quilty had a fear of being a participant of war since he was a child, and was robustly anti-war in his sentiments as a consequence. His time in Afghanistan, however, and more specifically his contact with the personnel in the context of their duties and the conditions they operated under, had greatly nuanced his attitude. Of his experience in Afghanistan, Quilty stated:

The first night we landed there two or three rockets landed within the compound of Kandahar... Before I went to Afghanistan, I guess I was anti-war. Most of the soldiers I met are. But the truth is far more complicated and the slogan is a simple one and I feel it does a huge disservice to the young people who are in Afghanistan. ²

Quilty spent three weeks in Kabul, Kandahar and Tarin Kot observing Australia's servicemen and women, and learning their stories. He made numerous sketches and took countless photographs of these personnel - both as records in their own right, and as notes for later works to be produced in his studio. On return to Australia, however, this material failed to translate into larger resolved works that captured the chaos, danger and burden of these soldier's experiences. Trusted with these first-hand descriptions, Quilty felt an overwhelming responsibility to convey a deeper insight into the bravery and consequence of the situation.

As the soldiers that Quilty had been embedded with in Afghanistan returned to Australia, he invited them to visit his studio individually to catch-up and to pose for new portraits. Wanting to engage with their vulnerability - and to side-step the emotional shielding afforded by the uniform and protective clothing - Quilty asked his sitters to pose naked. Distinct from the typical military portrait in regalia, Quilty's nudes capture the physical stature of these soldiers, but in a disarmed, and occasionally, in a clearly exhausted state. Their emotions are somewhat ambiguous, but raw and weighty. Away from their military units and the pressures of the frontline, the functional stoicism and humour that was essential to their survival gave way to residual burdens. ³

Captain Kate Porter, after Afghanistan

Captain Kate Porter, after Afghanistan 2012 is clearly a picture of grit and strength, but also lingering tension and vigilance. The context that has led to her state is indicated by the title 'after Afghanistan', but the specific events are entirely absent. Instead of seeing the sitter in the wild and overwhelming conditions that we can deduce she has seen, we see her unmasked. Facing the sitter's emotional and physical state in this way elicits an empathetic awareness rather than a rationalising approach. Had Quilty more directly rendered the events that the Captain found most difficult - as opposed to their impact - we might feel shocked or even appalled, but the painting would become a chronicle and explanation, rather than a focussed record of the sitter's feeling. Perhaps unsurprisingly, some sitters were quite aware of their feelings, while others distanced themselves from the emotional burdens they were harbouring. Air Commodore John Oddie, for instance, acknowledged:

... either through a lack of insight or through an unwillingness... I wasn't always admitting the truth to myself about my life. Ben really took that out and put it on the table in front of me like a three-course dinner and I said, well how about that? And you know, I sort of thought well, I'm not going to come to this restaurant again in a hurry! ⁴

RELATED: ANZAC stands for Australian and New Zealand Army Corps. The soldiers from the First World War became known as Anzacs, and the pride they took in that name endures to this day.

This is a caring portrayal of this sitter's time spent in Afghanistan's war zone, and a strong acknowledgement of the lasting emotional and psychological impacts of such exposure. As part of the larger 'After Afghanistan' series, this work is also emblematic of the wider experience endured by many Australians at war and performing peacekeeping missions. The legacy of such conflicts on individuals, their families and their communities, is often underrepresented in the media and historical account. The lasting stresses of fear and exhaustion, violence and destruction, can plague these heroic personnel throughout their lives. In that regard, this major work is not merely a formal and technical feat - but representative of a greater cultural maturation regarding the depiction of war within the Australian cultural context.
Peter McKay is Curatorial Manager, Australian Art, QAGOMA 1. Lisa Slade, Ben Quilty. The University of Queensland Art Museum, Brisbane, 2009, p.14.
Feature image detail: Ben Quilty Captain Kate Porter, after Afghanistan 2012 #BenQuilty #QAGOMA 2. Ben Quilty, War Paint from the Australian Story series. Australian Broadcasting Corporation. First broadcast 3 September, 2012.
3. Laura Webster, Ben Quilty: After Afghanistan. Australian War Memorial, Canberra, 2013, p.18.

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Ben Quilty's 'Captain Kate Porter, after Afghanistan' is a picture of strength - QAGOMA Blog

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Ben Quilty is one of Australia's most visible and most recognisable contemporary artists - known equally as well for his numerous humanitarian activities as for his ambitious impasto paintings. Quilty first came to attention for his images dealing with the risk-taking behaviour that he and his young male cohort would engage in - excessive drinking, drug-taking and dangerous driving in particular.

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Jack Whitten: An Artist's Life | Art21 "Extended Play"

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Racial Identity and capturing 'where we are from"

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Becoming an Artist: Yinka Shonibare | Tate Kids

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Yayoi Kusama – Obsessed with Polka Dots | Tate

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Creates work as a negative reaction towards the anger that she has towards traumatic experiences in her life.

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Louise Bourgeois – 'I Transform Hate Into Love' | TateShots

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Representing Black Artists and how Racism and Status exists in Art

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Artist Jenny Saville: why human bodies fascinate

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Creating "sound suits" in order to be heard you've got to speak louder.

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Nick Cave: Exploring Identity through the Arts

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"Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it," Joan Didion wrote in A Year of Magical Thinking.

Many of us are blind to the realities of loss and mourning until we're confronted with it head on, whether in the face of a devastating news headline, a lifeless animal on the side of the road, or the life-altering loss of a loved one. There are many, if not infinite shapes that loss can take, and the impressions they make upon us are just as varied.

"There is no real way to deal with everything we lose," Didion continues, and yet we, as humans, continue to find ways to cope. For centuries, artists have turned to their work to address feelings of anger, confusion, fear, sadness, hope and love. While no painting, photograph or object can ever mend the holes that materialize in our hearts, the following artworks address loss in ways that attempt to begin the healing process, however long it may take.

From the 15th century to 2015, these are just a mere portion of the artists who've turned to art in the face of loss. Their courage, thoughtfulness and, of course, talent, is as inspiring as ever.

Memling, a 15th century German-born painter who worked in the tradition of Early Netherlandish painting, created this epic triptych comparing the beautiful luxuries of earthly existence with the looming prospects of death and eternal hell. The haunting image is a prime example of a memento mori, an artwork hinting at the mortality that taunts us all.

This epic painting, thought to have been created in the 1480s, portrays the body of Christ laid out and lifeless, as he's watched over by the Virgin Mary and Saint John. The work employs a masterful understanding of foreshortening and realism, both contributing to the overall unsettling impression of the work. Details like the holes left from the nails on the cross and Christ's inflated thorax present the tragedy not as mythical lore, but as the stuff of real life.

In the later years of his life, between 1819 and 1823, the already fairly dark Goya took it a step further with what are now known as the "Black Paintings." After surviving two near-fatal illnesses, one which left him mostly deaf, Goya was terrified of relapsing, incorporating his fear and impending insanity into his artworks. The most renowned of the bunch depicts a wide-eyed Saturn feasting on one of his children, in what has to be one of the most frightening artworks of all time.

This undated painting, which currently lives at the Van Gogh Museum in Antwerp, renders a macabre vision of a smoking skeleton in a muted, monochromatic palette. It remains somewhat ambiguous whether the artist van Gogh was making a serious commentary on the brevity of life, or a sardonic jab at the seriousness of morbid art. The museum website explains: "It was probably executed in the winter of 1885-86, during Van Gogh's stay in Antwerp. This skull with a cigarette was likely meant as a kind of joke, and probably also as a comment on conservative academic practice."

The 1894 sculpture, located in at the Protestant Cemetery in Rome, serves as the grave for Story's wife. Replicas of the heart wrenching statue sit everywhere from Luxembourg to Costa Rica to Stanford University.
© 2013 Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, D.F. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
This 1946 painting is far from the only time Kahlo addressed dark themes of death and suffering in her work. All too often she rendered herself in surreal scenarios trapped between life and death, symbolic of the extensive suffering she endured in her lifetime. Kahlo contracted polio as a child, severely weakening one of her legs. At 18, she endured a tragic tram accident in which she broke both her pelvis and spine, resulting in a life riddled with physical anguish, operations and addictive painkillers. Infertility, an abortion, and miscarriages were all subsequent consequences of her poor health. All this pain takes beautiful shape in Kahlo's imaginative paintings, in which she rips open her wounds for all to see.

Nedjar, who was born 1947 in a village near Paris, grew up amidst stories about the horrors of the Holocaust, where many members of his family had lost their lives. "I identified with the corpses. I felt the violence," he said after watching "Night and Fog" on television. He channeled his dark visions into disturbing dolls that appear to be part cocoon, part fetus, part alien, part decaying roadkill, part nightmare. " This is not the decay of a fruit or a rose, as in the vanitas still lifes of the Dutch 17th century," Katherine Lieber wrote of the works. "This is not even the decay of an animal, like a gull found dead on the shore. The poupées reflect the dereliction that underlies human existence: the fragility of the body of that which is intelligent, thinking and self-aware, and the fact that it will decompose and rot quickly, once the spirit has fled."
via Museum der Moderne Salzburg
Mendieta, born in Havana, Cuba in 1948, moved to the U.S. at 12 years old to escape Castro's regime. She then began a brief yet ardent artistic career -- she died at just 36 years old -- grappling with issues of love, death and rebirth using her body and mother nature as a vessel. In "Silhouette," she lay shrouded in an ancient Zapotec grave, letting natural forms eat up her diminutive form.

Woodman was only 22 years old when she killed herself in 1981 by leaping out of a window. Perhaps in part because of her untimely end, her work is imbued with a sinister chill, as if each image was in some way predicting the darkness to come. The brilliant young artist constantly photographed herself in domestic spaces, often trapped, smudged or fading away like a ghost. The hauntingly beautiful images address not only death itself, but the sort of death involved in the domestic existence many women were forced to experience
Felix Gonzalez-Torres, "Untitled," 1991. Billboard. Installation view of Felix Gonzalez-Torres Billboard Project. Artpace Foundation, San Antonio, TX. Jan.-Dec. 2010. © The Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation/Courtesy Andrea Rosen Gallery/photo Tom DuBrock
Cuban-born artist Gonzalez-Torres created this quiet yet haunting billboard in 1991, the same year he lost his lover of eight years, Ross Laycock, to an AIDS-related illness. The massive image of the empty bed conjures associations of rest, desire, death and loneliness, as a place of intimacy and comfort is suddenly transformed into a space of isolation. Gonzalez-Torres mounted the image on 24 billboards to commemorate the day his love died.

" I've got an obsession with death," the contentious Bristish artist once said. "But I think it's like a celebration of life rather than something morbid." His massive 1991 piece consisted of a tiger shark preserved in formaldehyde in a vitrine. In 2007, a New York Times review captured the all-powerful effect of the work: "In keeping with the piece's title, the shark is simultaneously life and death incarnate in a way you don't quite grasp until you see it, suspended and silent, in its tank. It gives the innately demonic urge to live a demonic, deathlike form."

Courtesy Yvon Lambert Gallery, Paris.

This 1992 photograph was taken, as you may have guessed, inside a morgue, by prolific provocateur Serrano. The chilling series brings the viewer in such close proximity to corpses it feels as if you are bending over their lifeless bodies. Every blemish, every scratch, every discoloration is disturbingly conspicuous, making the deceased feel at once more and less human.
Photo Credit: Trevor Coe - Savannah, GA
After losing a friend, Taiwanese-American artist Chang expressed her grief in a simple yet transformative way, writing "Before I die I want to _____." on the wall of an abandoned New Orleans building. Within 24 hours, the wall was filled with personal aspirations, hopes and goals -- everything from "be myself completely" to "see equality for all." The project, illuminating the precious nature of life in an empowering and optimistic manner, has been recreated in over 500 cities and over 70 countries, including Iraq, China, Haiti, Brazil, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and South Africa.

The Russian contemporary photographer Ionova-Gribina revisits our early encounters with death, often experienced via the loss of an animal, whether it's a beloved pet or an anonymous critter on the side of the road. In her photography series, Ionova-Gribina creates and captures monuments to animals she discovered riding on her bike, all of whom died of natural causes. She surrounds each animal with bright flowers picked from her backyard, creating beautiful tributes. "I wanted to find a way to save them for the world of art," she explains in her artist statement. "They were so unprotected... One or two days more and they would be eaten by worms."

Oakland-based artist Val Britton crafts mixed-media cartograms, abstract roadmaps through physical locations as well as emotional and psychological terrain. She began the project as a way to connect with her father, a long haul truck driver who passed away when Britton was a child. " Based on road maps, routes my father often traveled, and an invented conglomeration and fragmentation of those passageways, my works on paper help me piece together the past and make up the parts I cannot know," she explains in her statement.

Contemporary photographer Hargreaves captured recreations of inmates' last meals, revealing the bizarre contrast between the gesture of kindness and the ultimate act of cruelty. "In New Zealand (where I'm from), and in fact nearly any where else in the developed world, the Death Penalty is just not even in the conversation," he explained. "It is a remnant of an earlier era. This little bit of civility, 'hey, we are going to kill you but what would you like to eat?' just jumped off the page." The images are coupled with text describing both the prisoner's criminal history and the dish they requested, yielding a complex portrait of how parts of even the most villainous figures in history remain relatable.

Vervaeka, a contemporary photographer, documents the eerily beautiful portraits adorning Hong Kong's cemeteries, as natural elements drive the images further and further into abstraction. " The images of black-and-white faces, having braved exposure to rain, sun and extreme temperatures, gain an ethereal glow as time eats away at them. As the faces fade into anonymity, their bodies fade into nature and the world beyond." The ghostly photos capture a peculiar location, at once a burial site and a portal to the world beyond, a house of death that is meant to remind us of life.
Image courtesy of the Saatchi Gallery, London
"In the nineties, the graves of criminal authorities began to have large and expensive tombstones -- at a height of about three meters [10 feet] and engraved with a full-length portrait and an expensive car in the background," Tarasov said in an email exchange with The Huffington Post. "This was done primarily to stand out and surpass all the dead in the cemetery, as well as the people that try to outdo everyone in life." Tarasov documents an unusual relic of 1990s Russia, an era of excess thanks to the newly privatized economic system. Specifically, he captures the opulent gravestones of mobsters and mafiosos, those who'd do almost anything to maintain their wealth. It's a morbid portrait of luxury and it's consequences quite unlike any other.

" I found myself deeply overwhelmed by the need to keep even the most mundane of my mom's belongings when she died suddenly this past February," contemporary photographer Jennifer Loeber explains in her artist statement. The artist turned to the things her mother left behind, formerly banal objects transformed into tangible evidence of her mom's existence, as artistic inspiration. The resulting images are thoughtful odes to her mother's memory, as experienced through a tube of lipstick, a curling iron, a pearl ring, and the other day-to-day objects she used and loved.

Contemporary photographer Kisiel captures roadkill on the side of American highways, surrounded by flowers in the location where their lives came to their untimely end. " My images draw attention to the fact that, while man has a vast impact on animal and natural life, generally in American society, people are separate from wildlife and the souls of animals have little value," she explains in her artist statement. "To cause the viewer to feel struck by this notion, I photograph memorials I have built surrounding roadkill at the location at which its life was taken."
Courtesy of the artist and Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago.
Patterson's performance, a spectacular procession of blinged-out coffins with feathers, tassels and sequins, took place on April 27, 2014 in Kingston, Jamaica. The work was influenced by the funeral practices common in Jamaican, lower-income communities, thus providing visibility to the often overlooked region. " A bling funeral is a powerful declaration of presence, and that is what I have tried to bring to this public space at carnival time," Patterson explained in an interview with the Jamaica Observer.
©Titus Kaphar. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.
Kaphar's 2014 work features the faces of young, unarmed black men who lost their lives at the hands of the police. Using chalk on asphalt paper, Kaphar traces their faces until one bleeds into the other and any sense of recognition is obscured, rendering a hazy image reminiscent of a chalk outline of a body on the street. "As you look at the drawings, your eyes struggle to reconcile the multiple faces into one," Kaphar told the Huffington Post, "In these pieces, I'm thinking about mistaken identities, similar life struggles, and fitting the description."

BEFORE YOU GO

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A Brief History Of Creative People Grappling With Loss And Death Through Art

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"Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it," Joan Didion wrote in A Year of Magical Thinking. Many of us are blind to the realities of loss and mourning until we're confronted with it head on, whether in the face of a devastating news headline, a lifeless animal on the side of the road, or the life-altering loss of a loved one.

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One of the first he produced, The Death of Casagemas (1901), responded directly to Casagemas's suicide. The oil-on-wood work shows the poet's bluish-green face swaddled in white blankets. He looks almost peaceful, as if sleeping, but Picasso's addition of a bullet hole on his subject's temple lays the tragedy bare.

Even before Casagemas's passing, Picasso had struggled with a series of other deaths in his life. In 1895, his seven-year-old sister Conchita died of diptheria, and in 1899, the painter Hortensi Guell, a member of Picasso's circle in Barcelona, threw himself off a cliff. Picasso was also aware of 's 1890 suicide, and scholars have suggested that similarities between van Gogh's paintings and the

brushwork and moody palette of the young Picasso's The Death of Casagemas were rendered in homage to the late artist.

Picasso's grief for his sister, friends, and painter-hero mingled with his own internal creative conflicts. By early 1901, he hadn't yet found a unique artistic voice-nor had he sold enough work to support himself. Together, these crises troubled Picasso and "formed a pattern of events suggesting that artists-at least those who live in opposition to mainstream society-are fated to suffering and tragedy," as curator William H. Robinson pointed out.

Picasso identified with this plight, as a 1901 self-portrait made clear. While he was only 20 years old when he painted the piece, he depicts himself as gaunt, sallow, and fragile-a man who looks 50, rather than an energetic young fellow at the outset of his career. A spectrum of dusty, dark blues saturate the subject and the backdrop he stands against, while his face is an icy bluish-white, his coat a deep cobalt, and his eyes wells of navy. The overall impression is one of dejection: a tormented artist cast out of society.

Picasso's use of blue to communicate pain and desolation has been traced to numerous sources. He was informed by

painters like

, who filled canvases exploring themes like human destiny with blues. Take Gauguin's Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (1897), in which ceruleans and azures dominate the palette. Picasso was also drawn to the work of Romantic writers, like Alfred de Vigny's stories of poets fated with tragic lives. As Robinson points out, the main character in Vigny's novel Stello is a poet "favored by the stars," but tormented by the "blue devils" of ennui.

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The Emotional Turmoil behind Picasso's Blue Period

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One of the first he produced, The Death of Casagemas (1901), responded directly to Casagemas's suicide. The oil-on-wood work shows the poet's bluish-green face swaddled in white blankets. He looks almost peaceful, as if sleeping, but Picasso's addition of a bullet hole on his subject's temple lays the tragedy bare.

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Claire Tabouret's New Self-Portraits Capture the Fragility of Solitude

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Painted during quarantine, her most recent series of self portraits will be on view at Perrotin's Tokyo space starting November 19th.

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Berrío's main focus is female figures, but she rarely paints real people or from life, preferring to work with characters of her own invention inspired by every kind of woman and their complexities. "I see my work as a novel, every painting is a different chapter, and every character has a different story," she said. In these new works, Berrío wanted to recreate the feeling of a barren home, where the gaze of the woman and her pregnant belly fill it with life. This novelistic approach is also found in the work of her close friend

, whose exhibition "A Countervailing Theory" was also due to open in London in Spring and has now been unveiled at the Barbican. Berrío often looks to the holy trinity of magical realism-Gabriel García Marquez, Pablo Neruda, Jorge Luis Borges-and the visual qualities of their poems, blending reality and fantasy, memory and fiction.

This kind of juxtaposition between real and imagined is in fact closer to the way we live and perceive the world today. Berrío herself grew up on a farm in the countryside in Colombia, surrounded by animals and mountains, flora and fauna. Hers was a peaceful childhood in contrast to what was happening elsewhere in Colombia in the 1990s, one of the most dangerous eras in the country's history. "Living far away has created a longing for where I come from, which appears in the work," Berrío said. "It relates to my own trajectory, of being somewhere, coming from somewhere else, being away too long and having this illusion about where I'm from."

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María Berrío's Lush New Paintings Show Women Persevering Despite Disaster

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Berrío's main focus is female figures, but she rarely paints real people or from life, preferring to work with characters of her own invention inspired by every kind of woman and their complexities. "I see my work as a novel, every painting is a different chapter, and every character has a different story," she said.

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Ben Quilty focusing on soldiers that have been affected by War in Afghanistan

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Ben Quilty focusing on soldiers that have been affected by War in Afghanistan

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Ben Quilty: after Afghanistan - extended interview

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Enjoying a stellar recognition in the international art waters for years now, Jenny Saville is a British painter whose profoundly stylized pieces of nude portraiture depict captivating bulky figures. Initially, this author emerged as part of the Young British Artists group alongside the likes of Damien Hirst and Sarah Lucas. Jenny is fascinated by flesh and the human body, a feature that is best explained by the author herself: I paint flesh because I'm human. If you work in oil, as I do, it comes naturally. The flesh is just the most beautiful thing to paint. This simple and yet quite adequate explanation actually portrays Saville's body of work rather accurately - her uncompromising treatment of painterly bodies has even caused some to draw comparisons with the artworks of Lucian Freud and Peter Paul Rubens[1].

Jenny Saville - Mirror - Image via pinimg.com

Jenny Saville and Her Fascination With Flesh

Jenny Saville was born on the 7th of May during the year of 1970, in Cambridge, England. She attended the classes at the Lilley and Stone School in Newark, now known as the Grove School Specialist Science College. Her college days were spent in Scotland as Jenny studied at the Glasgow School of Art between the years of 1988 and 1992. After that, Saville found herself at the receiving end of a six-month scholarship - she stayed at the University of Cincinnati where, as Jenny herself described, she saw lots of big women and big white bodies in shorts and T-shirts. This was just the kind of physicality that she was interested in as Saville enjoyed observing fat meat ever since her early fascination with her large piano teacher. Saville also credits Pablo Picasso as one of her strongest influences that turned her towards the female figures as the legendary Spaniard possessed a way of treating painterly subjects as if they were solidly there and not fleeting[2]. At the end of Saville's postgraduate education, the leading British art collector, Charles Saatchi, offered the artist an 18-month contract and agreed to support her while she created new artworks to be exhibited at the collector's leading gallery in London. Upon completion, these pieces became a part of the Young British Artists III collection and were presented to the wider public in the year of 1994. Saville's self-portrait titled as The Plan was her personal highlight of the show.

Obsession with flesh and big women was a constant drive for the entirety of Jenny Saville's career, ever since her earliest college days of art making

Jenny Saville - The Mothers, 2011 / A Self Portrait on Top of a Glass Table - Images via bp.com and sothebysc.om

The Launch Into Stardom

Naturally, many new pieces soon followed the revelation of The Plan, all causing more attention from the viewers than the previous one. Rising quickly to critical and public recognition, Jenny established an approach that requited her to use figure painting, a classical standard in art history, and turn it into something contemporary and completely her own. She started reinventing the core principles of figure painting and reestablish its context in the modern scene. Saville is primarily noted for her use of large-scale paintings as her nudes are usually placed atop large surfaces that further reinforce the size of the depicted figures. Keeping the form distorted was always a huge issue for this author as these deformities usually carry the conceptual idea behind the piece. She usually achieved these effects by using high-caliber brush strokes and patches of oil color, demonstrating a strong control over this relatively challenging technique of forming a painterly composition. These images are strongly pigmented and give a highly sensual impression of the surface of the skin - a characteristic that is often referred to as one of Saville's most precious abilities. Since 1994, plastic surgery operations performed in the New York City became a big part of Jenny's work, naturally fitting in with the already established concepts and the fascination with the obese body[3]. She kept her focus on the female body, although she did slightly deviate into subjects with transgender and indeterminate gender. Furthermore, her obsession with all the things mankind and other factors can do with a body is underlined by the often incorporation of disturbing photographs within her shows and published books, such as the pictures of liposuction, trauma victims, deformity correction, disease states and transgender patients.

What Saville is ultimately credited for achieving is reinventing the context of figurative painting within the world of contemporary art

Jenny Saville - Oxyrhynchus[4] - Image via timeout.com

The Beauty of the Grotesque

Ultimately, the main feature of Jenny Saville's art is the captivation by the endless aesthetic and formal possibilities behind the materiality of the human body, all of its flaws and features. Her monumental oil paintings possess subjects imbued with a sculptural yet elusive dimensionality that verges on the abstract, yet are obviously exaggerated in a grotesque manner. They are deformed, obese, brutalized or mutilated, offering the perfect contrast to the conventional idealized portraits of women often used as references to the most beautiful artworks ever created. This kind of morbidity is often discovered among the works of the Young British Artists and finds a place in all the non-portraiture pieces of Saville as well. It's even present in her mature works where the bodies are embracing, intertwined in Jenny's enduring figurative investigations that evolved as she herself matured over the years[5].

This artist is represented by Gagosian Park & 75 New York, Gagosian West 24th Street New York, Gagosian Beverly Hills, Gagosian Britannia Street London and Gagosian West 21st Street New York.

Jenny Saville lives and works in Oxford, England.
References:

1. Eccher, D., Jenny Saville, Electa; Bilingual edition, 2005

2. Anonymous (credited to Gagosian Gallery), Jenny Saville, Rizzoli; 2nd Printing edition, 2005

3. Richardson, J., Jenny Saville: Continuum, Gagosian / Rizzoli, 2012

4. Elderfield, J.,Jenny Saville: Oxyrhynchus, Gagosian / Rizzoli, 2015

5. Brutvan, C., Cullinan, N., Jenny Saville, Norton Museum of Art, 2012

Featured image: Jenny Saville - Photo of the artist in front of her work - Image via royalacademy.org.uk
All images used for illustrative purposes only.

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Enjoying a stellar recognition in the international art waters for years now, Jenny Saville is a British painter whose profoundly stylized pieces of nude portraiture depict captivating bulky figures. Initially, this author emerged as part of the Young British Artists group alongside the likes of Damien Hirst and Sarah Lucas .

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Death and War and Suffering and Poverty

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German printmaker, sculptor, teacher, and social activist Käthe Kollwitz was no stranger to change. Born in 1867, she witnessed seismic political, societal, and economic shifts under three regimes: the German Empire, the Weimar Republic, and the Third Reich. She experienced the trauma of two world wars, losing her youngest son in World War I, and her grandson and Berlin home in World War II. She died in April 1945, shortly before the war ended. As an artist, Kollwitz believed it was her duty to picture the loss, injustice, and poverty that these significant transformations brought upon the German working class. Activism played out through her works, as Kollwitz cast light on the plight and suffering of the disenfranchised.

Kollwitz the Printmaker

Change also came to define Kollwitz's approach to printmaking. Both a perfectionist and problem solver, she never shied away from the challenge of drastically reworking a composition. She was open to switching from one printmaking medium to another, and even willing to reject a work completely-only to begin again. Kollwitz was largely self-taught and highly experimental in how she approached traditional techniques, especially in her complex layering of etching processes on a single plate.

The elaborate, demanding process of revising and refining her ideas reflects Kollwitz's sustained scrutiny of the merit and meaning of her art. Despite her many successes and achievements-including her election as the first woman member of the Academy of Arts in Berlin in 1919-she continuously grappled with doubts about the aesthetic and political integrity of her work. Diary entries and letters frequently divulge frustration and apprehension as she produced multiple states and versions of a subject. However, Kollwitz did not view her trials and abandoned projects as failures. Not only did she keep her working sheets, but often inscribed them with a small "x" in pencil in the lower-left corner, preserving them for her family.

Inside Getty's Kollwitz Collection

In 2016, the Getty Research Institute acquired the Dr. Richard A. Simms Collection, featuring prints and drawings by Kollwitz that provide a unique insight into her creative process and technical experiments in printmaking. These works allow us to trace the evolution of a design-from preparatory drawing to trial and corrected workings proofs, and finally to a finished state. They sometimes constitute a timeline of an artistic process that spanned several years. Dr. Simms, a Los Angeles art collector, acquired the core of the collection in 1978 from Kollwitz's estate. Many of these 121 sheets were specially marked by the artist with a graphite "x." Dr. Simms continued to seek rare prints and drawings by Kollwitz over the next four decades.

Must-See: In Memoriam Karl Liebknecht

Among the many rare and compelling works on view from the Simms collection in Käthe Kollwitz: Prints, Process, Politics is a sequence of preparatory sheets for In Memoriam Karl Liebknecht. The work memorialized the recently assassinated leader of the Spartacus League (precursor to the Communist Party of Germany), Karl Liebknecht, who was killed by paramilitary police on January 15, 1919. Kollwitz was shocked by the brutality of his death, and decided to create a print picturing Liebknecht surrounded by mourners. This project exemplifies Kollwitz's openness to question and rethink her approach, as she moved from etching to lithography, before arriving at woodcut.

Kollwitz's preparatory process typically began with multiple drawings. For this print, she started by drawing focused figure studies of Liebknecht's body in the mortuary. Witnessing an outpouring of immense sorrow at his death, she turned her attention to the subject of loss. The artist developed the print's composition in a charcoal and graphite preparatory study, which emphasizes the grief of five men who lean over Liebknecht's corpse. Dissatisfied with how she had rendered the two mourners on the right, she cut those sections out of the page, patched the sheet, and drew the figures anew.

In the etching that followed, she attempted to capture the drawing's shadowed, volumetric forms by imprinting the textures of paper and sandpaper into the etching ground. After producing seven states of this print, she rejected it, and decided instead to turn to lithography.

In the subsequent transfer lithograph, Kollwitz concentrated on the outlines of the mourner's bodies. Behind those nearest Liebknecht, she drew an additional row of faces into the scene, expanding the size of the crowd. Her inscription on this working proof compares this version to the etching she rejected:

Lower sections corner right etching better
man left etching better
man crying right etching good,
but torso
in front more bending over.

Sometime in late 1920 Kollwitz finally realized the print in woodcut. This powerful work depicts on an impressive scale, in stark black and white, the anguished mourners gathered around Liebknecht's body. Now one of her most recognized and celebrated works, In Memoriam Karl Liebknecht was the result of the artist's willingness to question, to experiment, and to keep making changes until she was satisfied.

The poverty, inequity, and wartime loss she portrayed remain urgent and relevant issues of our day. What is more, we can all relate to and admire the artist's willingness to challenge herself, to embrace the risk of failure as a part of experimentation, and to change her mind.

See prints and drawings by Käthe Kollwitz from the Dr. Richard A. Simms Collection in the exhibition Käthe Kollwitz: Prints, Process, Politics, on view at the Getty Research Institute from December 3, 2019 through March 29, 2020.

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German printmaker, sculptor, teacher, and social activist Käthe Kollwitz was no stranger to change. Born in 1867, she witnessed seismic political, societal, and economic shifts under three regimes: the German Empire, the Weimar Republic, and the Third Reich.

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Facts, biographical stuff

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“Frida Kahlo: Appearances Can Be Deceiving” \ Exhibition Tour

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In what is probably his best-known self-portrait, the 22-year-old Egon Schiele captivates us in a way that is at once self-confident and fragile. Nothing in this balanced composition is left to chance; every line finds its continuation or a counterpart to which it corresponds:hair and body are both cropped by the edges of the painting as if reflecting, one shoulder is pulled up with the other lowered, and the slender branches bear intensely coloured red lampion fruit (which actually are more likely Chinese lantern flowers).

1912 was an extremely productive year for Egon Schiele, a year during which his expressionistic style of painting became somewhat calmer and closer to reality.Schiele's intense involvement with himself, life and the society of his times was to be interrupted abruptly in April of 1912. Schiele, who lived with his girlfriend Wally in the town of Neulengbach, was wrongfully accused of kidnapping an underage girl and taken into investigative custody.Although the charges were soon dropped, Schiele was deeply hurt in terms of his creativity and his self-image as an artist.This is not yet evident in his Self-Portrait with Lampion Fruit; this painting shows an Egon Schiele who is sensitive, confident of his giftedness and likely at the zenith of his creativity.

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Self Portrait with Physalis, 1915 by Egon Schiele

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In what is probably his best-known self-portrait, the 22-year-old Egon Schiele captivates us in a way that is at once self-confident and fragile.

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The Two Fridas

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What this painting tells us about Frida Kahlo

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Reflection with Two Children (Self-Portrait)

From his very first works, which display the painstaking detail of the Flemish primitives and a certain neo-romantic, surreal air, Lucian Freud took a stand for figurative art and against the prevailing abstract trends. Since then his work has been fuelled by the tension between reality and matter, between the visual and the tactile. His obsession with the human body has driven him to reinterpret the genre of portraiture in an original manner.

In his numerous self-portraits, the painter is always shown with a forced gesture, narrowing his eyes or peering downwards or sideways, with a gaze that evidences the effort involved in painting himself using a mirror. Reflection with Two Children (Self-Portrait), executed in 1965, combines an intense close-up of the artist, who twists his body in order to study his own reflection in a mirror at his feet on the floor, with the lamp positioned behind him, which he renders as a semiabstract form that hovers over the painter. As John Russell states, the viewer is unable to grasp the image at first glance, as it is one of the first self-portraits in which Freud experiments with a set of two mirrors, and, as Catherine Lampert notes, we are forced to run our eyes up the figure, coming face-to-face with the artist's gaze. The idea of a mirror reflection is reinforced by the plain grey background that causes the touches of light concentrated on the face and hands to stand out even more powerfully. The image of Rose and Ali, the children Suzy Boyt bore him, in the lower left corner is inspired by the tomb of the dwarf Seneb and his family in the Cairo museum, reproduced in Geschichte Aegyptens, Freud's inseparable companion throughout his long career as a painter.

The technique of sweeping, expressive brushstrokes can be linked to the portraits of Frans Hals, whom Freud regarded as a modern artist on account of his rough style. Freud, who was defined - not coincidentally - by William Feaver as a "a Paddington Hals willing himself to spontaneity, " admired the Dutch master's firm, direct manner of applying the paint using a heavily loaded hogshair brush, which accentuated the artist's action in crystallising the sitter on canvas.

Paloma Alarcó

Related works

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Reflection with Two Children (Self-Portrait)

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× Reflection with Two Children (Self-Portrait) From his very first works, which display the painstaking detail of the Flemish primitives and a certain neo-romantic, surreal air, Lucian Freud took a stand for figurative art and against the prevailing abstract trends. Since then his work has been fuelled by the tension between reality and matter, between the visual and the tactile.

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Lucas's group of twelve photographic self have been reproduced digitally as Iris in an of one hundred and fifty. They range from her first photographic self portrait, Eating a Banana 1990 () to the more recent Human Toilet Revisited 1998, which also exists in the Tate collection as a c-type print (Tate ). Photographic self portraits have been an important element of Lucas's work since the early 1990s. The seminal Eating a Banana changed Lucas's perception of her 'masculine' appearance from being a disadvantage to being something she could use in her art. 'I suddenly could see the strength of the masculinity about it - the usefulness of it to the subject struck me at that point, and since then I've used that' (Lucas quoted in Barber, p.16). The resulting confrontational self portrait photographs , made throughout the 1990s, complement her sculptural and installation work. Through them she presents an identity which challenges stereotypical representations of gender and sexuality. Posing simultaneously as tough and , macho but female, she creates an image of defiant femininity .

Two of Lucas's early which post-date Eating a Banana, Divine 1991 () and Self Portrait with Mug of Tea 1993 (), have been included in the group. In these two images, as in the later Self Portrait with Fried Eggs 1996 (), Lucas appears in the macho pose she has claimed as her own. Clad in old jeans and heavy footwear, she sits with her legs wide apart and her feet planted firmly on the ground. Androgynous t-shirts and leather jackets feature in many of the images. In Self Portrait with Knickers 1994 () she stands, hands on her hips, her dark-coloured 'hard-chick' clothing contrasting with the white underwear strung up on a washing line behind her. In all these images her gaze back at the viewer is direct and uncompromising. Food representing or standing in for sexual body parts is a common theme in Lucas's work, mainly employed to reveal and subvert degrading objectification of the body in vernacular language. Fried eggs feature as breasts in sculptural installations and cover Lucas's own breasts in her Self Portrait with Fried Eggs. In Got a Salmon On #3 1997 () Lucas stands outside a public toilet, a huge salmon resting from her shoulder to below her waist, a pun on the idea of a female erection. Summer 1998 () portrays Lucas grimacing as she is sprayed with frothing beer. Like Eating a Banana and Lucas's film, Sausage Film 1990 (Tate ), it satirises traditional female roles in pornography. These images present a female artist of masculine appearance as an object for male desire.

Cigarettes have featured regularly in Lucas's work, as a rebel accessory, a phallic stand-in and a means for independence, for 'possessing time in a palpable way, stopping to pause and contemplate ... It's really important to have areas of your life - whether it's walking into a pub or smoking - where you suddenly feel you've found your own time zone.' (Lucas quoted in Sarah Kent, 'Young at Art', Time Out, October 7-14 1998, pp.38-42, p.42.) Fighting Fire with Fire 1996 () is a moody close-up depicting Lucas frowning with a fag between her lips. Smoking 1998 () is a more meditative image of the artist exhaling smoke as she lies, looking into the distance. The mood of Smoking is similar to that of the earlier image Human Toilet II 1996 () in which Lucas sits naked on the toilet bowl holding its cistern on her lap. As in Human Toilet Revisited 1996 () she has been photographed looking away from the camera and presents a more vulnerable aspect than in the confrontational poses of the earlier images. She appears caught unguarded in moments of quiet contemplation, perhaps closer to a meditation on the death drive which prevents people from giving up smoking despite its destructive effects on the body. Lucas is fascinated by the paradoxically co-existing drives towards both sex and death described by Sigmund Freud in his essay Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920). She refers to this in Self Portrait with Skull 1997 (), a photograph in which she sits on the floor with her legs apart and a skull positioned between her feet. Equating her sex with death, this image encapsulates the fear of obliteration, through a projected fantasy of engulfing and swallowing, evoked traditionally by the female body. For Lucas, as the female subject, this threat is posed by her own urges towards pleasure and self-destruction.

Further reading:
Pippa Coles, Matthew Higgs, Jacqui Poncelet, British Art Show 5, exhibition catalogue, South Bank Centre, London 2000, reproduced (colour) pp.88-9
Lynn Barber, 'Drag Queen', Observer Magazine, London, 30 January 2000, pp.10-16
Sarah Lucas, exhibition catalogue, Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam 1996

Elizabeth Manchester
December 2001
Does this text contain inaccurate information or language that you feel we should improve or change? We would like to hear from you.

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'Self Portrait with Skull', Sarah Lucas, 1997 | Tate

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'Self Portrait with Skull', Sarah Lucas, 1997

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Tracy Emin- affected by cancer scare, addiction, relationship issues

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Tracy Emin- affected by cancer scare, addiction, relationship issues

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Early on in lockdown, Tracey Emin was working on a painting-a large and strange semi-abstract one-that was keeping her up at night. She spent days staring at it. A few months later, she figured out what it was she had been making: a picture of a malignant lump, just like the one growing in her body, unbeknownst to her at the time.

"It's exactly the same as my bladder with the tumor in it, before I knew I had the cancer-it's brilliant!" she tells me over the phone from her London home. In a year marred by crisis, Emin has been experiencing a very personal one: cancer.

After a diagnosis in the spring and an operation in the summer, she is now in remission-and determined to funnel her grit and gratitude into new work, as soon as she feels well enough to paint again.

While in treatment, she has been preparing to open a deeply cathartic show at two of Xavier Hufkens's locations in Brussels. They feature drawings made during lockdown and a teeming array of 25 paintings from this year and the last. The topic, though, is one for the ages: love, in all of its nuances. "Details of Love" opens on Friday, October 30.

"The whole show is about the things that you notice when you're in love," she says, stressing that I shouldn't confuse those elements with being in love. "The rain is beautiful when you're in love... It's about understanding those small dots, the small things."

A Quest for a "Pure" Life

Emin's relationship with love has been a through line for much of her work in recent years. She made international headlines in 2016 when she announced that she had married a stone in her garden of her home in the south of France. (The idea was widely ridiculed in the press, but it had genuine feeling behind it: to embrace her life as a single woman, her love of her materials, and her work.)

There has been a noticeable softening to Emin's palette during this time, too-a move toward pastels and wispier silhouettes. The artist known for her condom-strewn My Bed and Everyone I Have Ever Slept With is still embracing raw feeling and the female body, but in a way that is less confrontational and more open to interpretation. The paintings in the Hufkens show ride the same wave as her critically acclaimed exhibition at White Cube Bermondsey, in early 2019.

Well before her diagnosis, Emin was making big changes: she decided to leave behind her longtime home of London and move by the sea, to Margate. She sold her Miami home. She stopped drinking and socializing for a while. She prioritized her inner world, a "pure" place for thinking and creating work.

"I had decided to change my life radically, in a split second," she says. Now, she is almost finished packing up her London home. She has mourned the loss of her beloved pet cat. She is paring down. All of this change, she says, gave her strength to fight cancer.

Two months ago, she had many of her female reproductive organs removed. She now also has a stoma bag. It was not easy for the artist, who is known for bravely delving into the universe of female desire as well as frankly recounting her own sexual journeys and traumas. "They were going to remove my clitoris, but I stopped them!" she says. "I said, 'keep it if you can'-and they have."

What is most frustrating, she says, is that she has not yet been able to do the thing she loves most: paint. But she has been making photographs of her own body as an "existential" project.

"It feels like I only really got going in the last five years, that I started to understand what I am doing and what I am painting for," she tells me. She says she has a lot of work "left to do" in her life, and-as an insomniac who loves what she does-it is hard to always be patient with her body. "Yesterday, I was crying because I wanted to paint and I didn't have the energy to do it."

She stops short of complaining, however-she doesn't see the point. Besides, she's tired of having been dubbed someone who moans. The deeply autobiographical and confessional nature of Emin's character and work has not always fared well with critics. When she spoke with unusual frankness about trauma, rape, and abortion, some dismissed her as vulgar and self-absorbed.

"Now, there is a language for women to express themselves, thanks to #MeToo," she says. "It's good that times are catching up, but I wish I hadn't been accused of being narcissistic back then."

Life in Lockdown

Given her health and the ongoing cross-border travel complications, she won't be going to Brussels for her opening. ("It's going to be a fucking mess," she says of the COVID-19 outbreaks across the UK and US.) But she's never particularly liked openings, and she enjoys the intimacy of online viewing ("I can just sit in bed"). Her one wish? To have an intimate opening dinner with Xavier Hufkens, her longtime dealer.

"Tracey has always remained loyal to her purpose: making art, and she does so with steadfast commitment, raw energy and abiding passion," Hufkens says. "Her paintings are psychologically forceful and crash into you like a tidal wave, yet they are also full of subtleties and vulnerable details."

This description certainly applies to the works on view, though Emin prefers a more brash tagline: they are "really fucking wild," she says. Not quite self-portraits, she labels them "self-feelings" or "inner projections." There are bodies huddled together, kissing, sleeping, tangled in sexual encounters. The paintings and drawings seem to have breath and emotion coursing through them.

As with much of Emin's art, the paintings and drawings are a manifestation of memory work, which Emin says is conjured mystically, as one's future is by a fortune teller. Looking at the complete body of work now, she supposes it could also represent a "wanted emotion" or something from the past, given that she has not been in love for a decade.

"I had fucking cancer, and having half my body chopped out, including half my vagina," she says, "I can feel more than ever that love is allowed." Being older, and on her own, doesn't mean she feels any less; quite the opposite is true. She is brimming with desire to experience life and make new paintings as soon as she can.

"At my age now, love is a completely different dimension and level of understanding," she says. "I don't want children, I don't want all the things that you might subconsciously crave when you're young-I just want love. And as much love as I can possibly have. I want to be smothered in it, I want to be devoured by it. And I think that is okay."
Tracey Emins's "Detail of Love" opens on October 30 and runs until December 19 at both Xavier Hufkens locations in Brussels.

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After a Cancer Diagnosis, Tracey Emin Is Slowing Down-But Says Her Best Work Is Still to Come | artnet News

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Early on in lockdown, Tracey Emin was working on a painting-a large and strange semi-abstract one-that was keeping her up at night. She spent days staring at it. A few months later, she figured out what it was she had been making: a picture of a malignant lump, just like the one growing in her body, unbeknownst to her at the time.

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You will need to research about the artworks beyond this website. Here are some examples of Migration artworks

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People have always moved around the world. Early humans were nomadic, traveling in search of food, shelter, and safety. Today, people move for many different reasons, including economic, political, cultural, religious, and environmental. Sometimes, events beyond people's control, like war or natural disaster, leave them displaced and forced to migrate. Other times, people migrate voluntarily, perhaps in search of better work opportunities or a different lifestyle. For many artists, their own migrations and those of their ancestors shape their identities and the art they produce.

As people move, they bring their traditions, knowledge, and beliefs with them. Often, as much as they absorb the culture of their new home, they influence it with their own traditions.
To explore more, click on each artwork thumbnail, then click again on the larger image that appears in the box above.
Related Artists: El Anatsui, Yto Barrada, Mona Hatoum, Yun-Fei Ji, Jacob Lawrence, Mateo López, Zarina

1. On the Move
Why do people migrate? Brainstorm a list of reasons why people move from one place to another.

Look at the works of art in this theme. How would you describe the types of migrations these artists portray? In discussion with a partner, compare and contrast the ways these artists portray migration.

2. Migrant Stories
Jacob Lawrence's Migration Series (1940-41) tells the story of African Americans moving from the southern United States to the North.

Interview someone who migrated from one place to another. It could be someone who immigrated to a new country or someone who moved from one town to the next town. Gather background information about why they left and how they chose their new home.

Tell your interviewee's story. Illustrate scenes from their journey by drawing a series of images, just as Jacob Lawrence did, or by writing several one-paragraph vignettes.

3. Home Dictionary
What does home mean to you? For Zarina, the images in Home Is a Foreign Place (1999) serve as a visual vocabulary of things related to home. She created abstract renderings of words like "afternoon," "hot-breeze," and "threshold."

Make a list of words that remind you of your home (or homes). They can be nouns, adjectives, and verbs; they can refer to tangible objects or abstract ideas.

In a notebook, write one word from your list at the bottom of each page. This notebook will be your home dictionary.

Over the next month, fill in the pages of the notebook with images that illustrate these words. Collect photographs, ticket stubs, ribbons, images and words from magazines, and other materials that represent your words, and them into your notebook.

4. Make a Family-Immigration Map
Where in the world has your family been? Print out a copy of the map of the world.

Identify the different places where you have lived and mark them on the map.

Next, research immigration in your family history. Interview relatives about how your ancestors traveled, both within your country and across continents. Mark your family's movement on the map.

Share your map with a partner. How was your family's journey different from that of your partner's family?

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Exploring the Mind of Edvard Munch; a Journey into Angst and Expressionism - Art History School