YBA Jenny Saville Responds To Venetian Art At Ashmolean Museum

The Ashmolean Museum, Oxford will present Titian to Canaletto: Drawing in Venice, a new exhibition allowing the viewer to discover how the splendour of Venice and its shimmering light influenced artists, resulting in compelling portraits, atmospheric landscapes of exceptional beauty and sensuous figure studies. The exhibition will be accompanied by a response from contemporary artist and YBA Jenny Saville.

In this parallel exhibition, Jenny Saville Drawing, one of the UK’s most celebrated contemporary artists, Saville, has produced new work on paper and canvas in response to the powerful qualities of Venetian drawing.

Venetian art has long been associated with brilliant colours and free brushstrokes, but drawing has largely been written out of its history. This ground breaking exhibition, in collaboration with the Uffizi in Florence, is based on new research. It traces the role of drawing in Venice and its importance over three centuries, dispelling the myth that Venetian artists, including their greatest painter, Titian, had no interest in drawing.

This is the first major exhibition of Venetian drawings in the UK and it includes over 100 magnificent works from the Uffizi, the Ashmolean, and Christ Church, Oxford, by artists such as Titian, Tintoretto and Canaletto.

About the artist:

Jenny Saville (born 7 May 1970) is a contemporary British painter associated with the Young British Artists. She is known for her large-scale painted depictions of nude women. Saville works and lives in Oxford, England. Saville went to the Glasgow School of Art (1988–1992), and was then awarded a six-month scholarship to the University of Cincinnati. Saville later emerged as a Young British Artist (YBA). Much of her work features distorted flesh, high-caliber brush strokes and patches of oil colour, while others reveal the surgeon’s mark of a plastic surgery operation. In 1994, Saville spent many hours observing plastic surgery operations in New York City.

Titian to Canaletto: Drawing in Venice – with a contemporary response by Jenny Saville – Ashmolean Museum Oxford – 15 October 2015 to 10 January 2016

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