Author Description

The core oeuvre of Austrian painter Egon Schiele (1890-1918) was produced within barely a decade, at the beginning of the twentieth century. His famous nudes probed the existential core of human experience. The paintings of British artist Jenny Saville (born 1970) are equally intense, with their physicality and confrontational stance. This catalogue brings the work of these two artists together for the first time. The stylistic and thematic proximity of the "body-landscapes" and portraits by these two young painters is revealed, despite the decades separating their work and their varying use of the brush. The paintings and drawings of both artists lend the human body an insistent corporeality, rendered in every detail. In Schiele's self-portraits, usually small-format works, the pose, the accentuated view from below and his gestural style give the images a visual impact equal to the forceful punch of Saville's giant-format paintings.