Jenny Saville: Ekkyklema

Gagosian presents Ekkyklema, an exhibition of new paintings and works on paper by Jenny Saville. The project’s title refers to a wheeled platform that was used to move interior scenes into the audience’s view during antique productions of Greek tragic drama and alludes to the artist’s search for a pictorial language with which to confront our simultaneous occupation of material and screen-based worlds. Ekkyklema is also concerned with the moment and mystery of conception—a truly universal subject.

Saville’s new work was inspired in part by the giant digital display screens employed at stadiums and other major event venues, the scale and visual power of which generate an overwhelming, almost religious spectacle. Throughout the exhibition, the artist compartmentalizes body parts into angular screenlike panels whose hard edges and clustered arrangements recall desktop computing’s windows and menus and the boxed-in talking heads of news broadcasts.