Artist of the day

Saturday, December 13, 2025

Artist of the Day, December 13, 2025 : Jenny Saville, a British painter (#2443)

Part of the infamous 1997 Sensation exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, Jenny Saville (1970) creates enormous canvases that focus on bodies in an unflinching manner. Likening the physicality of paint to the feeling and appearance of skin, Saville constructs sometimes horrifying images of contemporary identity. Collecting material from pathology textbooks, plastic surgery manuals, chronicles of injuries and burns, and similar publications, Saville often adds an observational perspective to her work by attending surgery demonstrations and visiting butcheries. As shown in Stare, 2004–5,these sources are the starting points for Saville’s aggressive use of scale, brushy, wide strokes, and textures that extend long figurative traditions in painting and inventively adapt the medium for meditations on victimization, trauma, and disease.

Saville draws much from the history of painting, especially artists known for pushing the human figure to its limits of stress and decomposition. She cites Diego Velázquez’s tonal virtuosity, the carcass paintings of Chaim Soutine and Rembrandt, and Willem de Kooning’s notion that “Flesh was the reason oil paint was invented” as key influences. Critics also add a roster of British painters, including Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach, and Lucian Freud, as important forerunners and inspirations for Saville’s work. What seems to separate Saville from her influences, however, is her reliance on conceptual, critical social messages instead of subjective expression.

© 2025. All content on this blog is protected by international copyright laws All images are copyrighted © by Jenny Saville or assignee. Apart from fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review as permitted under the Copyright Act, the use of any image from this site is prohibited unless prior written permission is obtained. All images used for illustrative purposes only

Ms. Jenny Saville

The studio

Strategy, 1994

Reverse, 2002–03

Stare, 2005

Rosetta II, 2005-06

In the realm of the Mothers II, 2014

Voice of the Shuttle (Philomela), 2014-15 detail

Blue Pieta, 2018

Self-Portrait (after Rembrandt), 2019

Prism, 2020

Ekvymeno VII

Falcrum

In the Realm of the Mothers

Reproduction Drawing IV

Reproduction Drawing II

Reproduction

The bride

Unknown title

Friday, December 12, 2025

Artist of the Day, December 12, 2025 : Felix Shumba, a Zimbabwean multidisciplinary emerging artist (#2442)

Felix Shumba (1989)is a Zimbabwean multidisciplinary emerging artist whose practice encompasses drawing, painting, video, text, and installation work. His work attempts at deconstructing spaces (real or imagined)—which he describes as Fold Fields Space (FFS). These are sites generally characterized and haunted by death, trauma, tension, restraint, psychic terror, ecological damage and use of the military as an apparatus of control.

Felix Shumba has exhibited work at Galleria Fonti, Italy; Jahmek Contemporary Art, Angola; and Sharjah Biennial, United Arab Emirates, among others.

In 1977, British-backed Rhodesian security forces conducted a raid on refugee camps run by the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army in Chimoio, Mozambique, resulting in the deaths of thousands of men, women, and children. Self-taught artist Felix Shumba’s presentation at Art Basel focuses on this dark chapter of history, foregrounding the historical erasure and lasting trauma caused by colonial powers. His installation includes a charcoal mural of a crepuscular forest, striking oil paintings of soldiers’ silhouettes, and a sculpture designed to play archival war transmissions, church hymns, and poems read by Shumba’s grandmother. The artist asks viewers to temporarily reflect on the memories and narratives he and others like him have no choice but to carry.

© 2025. All content on this blog is protected by international copyright laws All images are copyrighted © by Felix Shumba or assignee. Apart from fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review as permitted under the Copyright Act, the use of any image from this site is prohibited unless prior written permission is obtained. All images used for illustrative purposes only