Talk
The Un-Private Collection: Jenny Saville + Jennifer Doyle
Overview
The next program in The Un-Private Collection series will present a conversation with artist Jenny Saville and Jennifer Doyle, author and professor of English at the University of California, Riverside. The pair will discuss Saville’s work in the Broad collection and beyond: enormous canvases that focus on bodies in an unflinching manner. Likening the physicality of paint to the feeling and appearance of skin, she constructs sometimes horrifying images of contemporary identity. The talk will highlight the congruencies of Saville’s work and Doyle’s areas of interest, such as visual and performance studies, contemporary art history, gender studies, and critical theory.
Details
Jenny Saville
Captivated by the endless aesthetic and formal possibilities of the materiality of the human body, Broad collection artist Jenny Saville makes a highly sensuous and tactile impression of surface and mass in her monumental oil paintings. Subjects are imbued with a sculptural yet elusive dimensionality that verges on the abstract. In recent paintings, she renews her enduring figurative investigations by depicting bodies embracing and intertwined.
Saville was born in 1970 in Cambridge, England. She received her B.A. Honors Fine Art from Glasgow School of Art, Scotland. Recent solo museum exhibitions include Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rome (2005); Norton Museum of Art, Florida (2011, traveled to the Museum of Modern Art Oxford, England, through 2012); “Jenny Saville Drawing,” Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, University of Oxford, United Kingdom (2015–16); and “Now: Jenny Saville,” Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh (2018). Saville’s works are featured in several public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Broad, Los Angeles; and Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego. Saville’s work was included in the 50th Biennale di Venezia in 2003.
Saville currently lives and works in Oxford, United Kingdom.
Jennifer Doyle
Jennifer Doyle is a feminist writer, curator and scholar. Much of her scholarship unpacks what artworks teach us about sexual life — about pleasure, love, desire and pain. She is the author of Sex Objects: Art and the Dialectics of Desire, Hold It Against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art and Campus Sex/Campus Security. She curated The Tip of Her Tongue for The Broad, Nao Bustamante: Soldadera for The Vincent Price Art Museum and I Feel Different for LACE. She is a member of the Board of Directors at Human Resources, and a Professor of English at UC Riverside. She lives in Los Angeles.
About The Un-Private Collection
The Un-Private Collection is an ongoing series of public programs The Broad began in September 2013. The series introduces audiences to the museum’s 2,000-work contemporary art collection by showcasing stories behind the collection, the collectors and the artists. Since launching the program, The Broad has brought together a variety of artists whose works are in the Broad collection in conversation with cultural leaders, including Mark Bradford with Katy Siegel, Shirin Neshat with Christy MacLear, Jeff Koons with John Waters, Takashi Murakami with Pico Iyer, Eric Fischl with Steve Martin, John Currin with James Cuno, Kara Walker with Ava DuVernay and architect Elizabeth Diller with Eli Broad, Joanne Heyler and Paul Goldberger. Talks have been held at venues throughout Los Angeles, making the programming available to audiences across the city. Conversations are live-streamed and full videos of past talks are available online. The Un-Private Collection series is part of the Broad collection’s 30-year mission to make contemporary art accessible to the widest possible audience.
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