JENNY SAVILLE. Gaze

“Jenny Saville. Gaze” is an inquiry into the act of looking itself. This film accompanies the first Austrian solo presentation of Jenny Saville, one of the most influential and uncompromising figurative painters of our time, held at the Albertina Museum in Vienna. Through in-depth conversations with Director General Ralph Gleis, curator Angela Stief, and the artist herself, the film traces the profound conceptual, historical, and material threads that underpin Saville’s work.

For over three decades, Jenny Saville has engaged in a radical rethinking of the body – particularly the female body – within the lineage of Western painting. Drawing on the visual vocabularies of Old Masters like Leonardo da Vinci, Titian, and Rubens, she reconfigures their legacies from a contemporary, and crucially, female perspective. In Saville’s monumental canvases, flesh becomes both subject and substance: fragmented, layered, and rendered with a visceral physicality that defies idealization. Her paintings do not offer passive surfaces for contemplation; they confront the viewer, creating a dynamic of mutual gaze that questions who is looking, how, and why.

The exhibition title, Gaze, articulates this central tension. As Gleis notes, Saville’s work navigates the shifting cultural meanings of the body in an age of image saturation, aesthetic norms, and digital mediation. Her figures are not representations but presences – painted with a mass, density, and psychological charge that challenge conventional modes of seeing. Through abstraction, scale, and multi-perspectival construction, Saville creates a visual language that oscillates between intimacy and monumentality, seduction and rupture.

In the film, Saville reflects on painting as a space of philosophical inquiry: unlike photography or film, painting exists outside the linearity of time, compressing the decisions, hesitations, and revelations of its making into a singular surface. Her approach is exploratory, almost archaeological – a process of building and breaking form to arrive at an image that holds emotional and formal truth. She discusses the coexistence of abstraction and figuration in her work, the tension between materiality and illusion, and the desire to capture a reality that is always in flux.

Angela Stief, the exhibition’s curator, highlights Saville’s critical engagement with art history and her insertion into a canon long dominated by male perspectives. In works that reference classical motifs such as the Pietà or the Three Fates, Saville not only revisits but rewrites inherited narratives, embedding in them a contemporary consciousness shaped by gender, trauma, and embodied experience. Her use of multiple viewpoints, layered imagery, and corporeal excess allows for a more complex, fractured realism – one that is truer to the multiplicities of human identity and perception.

This film serves as both a document of an extraordinary exhibition and a meditation on painting’s enduring capacity to think the body anew. As Saville herself asserts, painting has no prescribed function in everyday life – and in that freedom lies its radical potential. “Jenny Saville. Gaze” invites us to witness an artist at the height of her powers and to confront, through her work, the shifting contours of how we see and how we are seen.

https://www.albertina.at

Interviewee: Ralph Gleis, Jenny Saville, Angela Stief
Artworks by: Jenny Saville

Copyright info: The audio and video recording has been made with personal permission of the artist.
Licensing: 0
Language(s): German, English
Subtitles: German, English
Producer: KA21 GmbH / CastYourArt
Production crew: Wolfgang Haas, Helmut Feier, Michael Rottmann
Production country: Austria, Vienna