Jenny Saville: Oxyrhynchus - Signed & Inscribed (Faust) 1st Edition / 1st Printing - Gagosian 2015
Jenny Saville: Oxyrhynchus - Signed & Inscribed.
Publisher: Gagosian
Publication date: 2015
Contributor: John Elderfield
Designer: Peter Willberg Ltd.
Printer: Pureprint Group, Uckfield, England
Distributor: Rizzoli International Publications, NYC
Format: Cloth hardcover
Dimensions: 13 × 11 5/8 inches (33 × 29.5 cm)
Pages: 112
Language: English
Condition: Like New, Pristine (See Photos).
On the inscription -
“There is a text by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe that has driven my work for more than a decade now, which connects to Twombly. While he was in Sicily, Goethe discovered the mothers of Angion—ancient fertility goddesses who are responsible for the fertility of the world and for creation in all its forms. He invented a place called the “Realm of the Mothers.” It is somewhere outside of time and place, and it is where all forms are created. In Goethe’s Faust Part II (1832), Mephistopheles says:
Take hold of it without disparaging. It shines and flashes, grows in my hand. How great its worth, will you now understand? The key will sense the right place from all others. Follow it down, t’will lead you to the Mothers. The Mothers like a shock, it smites my ear. What’s in this word I don’t like to hear? So limited in mind by each new word disturbed, will you only hear what you’ve always heard? Let naught perturb, however strange it rings, you’re long-accustomed to most wondrous things. In apathy I see no wheel for me. The thrill of all is man’s best quality. Whatever toll the world lays on this sense, enthralled, man deeply senses the immense. Descend then, or I could also say ascend. It’s all the same. Escape from the created into the unbound realm of forms. Delight in what long since was dissipated, like coursing clouds the throng is coiling around. Brandish the key and keep them out of bound. Good grasping it I feel new strength arise. My breast expands on to the enterprise. At last a glowing tripod tells you this that you’ve arrived in deepest deep abyss. You’ll see the Mothers in its radiant glow. Some sit, some stand, some wander to and fro, as it may chance. Formation, transformation, eternal minds, eternal recreation. Girt round by images of all things that be, they do not see you, forms alone they see. Do take courage then, for the peril’s great. And to the tripod go forth straight and touch it with the key”
This book was published on the occasion of Jenny Saville: Oxyrhynchus at Gagosian, Britannia Street, London, the first-ever solo exhibition of Saville’s paintings in London.
The publication features more than a dozen works from 2006 to 2014 in which the artist references the layers upon layers of discoveries at Oxyrhynchus, a city in upper Egypt that was established in 332 BCE and is considered one of the world’s most important archaeological sites. In a combination of oil, charcoal, and pastel, Saville conveys a mysterious narrative of layered bodies and images.
An essay by art historian John Elderfield, built around the observations of multiple past voices and the artist herself, captures the temporal culture of visual art to which the Oxyrhynchus canvases belong. Alongside reproductions of the artworks, numerous full-bleed details and installation photographs of the exhibition are included.
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