This is the opulently printed hardbound catalogue produced in conjunction with the 2002 Gagosian Gallery Beverly Hills exhibition of collaborative photographs by Jenny Saville and Glen Luchford.

As others have noted, there are relatively few works actually included, but for me, that is beside the point; the volume is rich in detailed close-ups of her brushwork revealing her wonderfully loose technique; in her brief interview with Simon Schama she mentions her affinity with abstract art - something I not only share but have explored in my own art for over a decade - I find myself very much in tune with her work. Huge, naked bodies, with a carnal physicality and oppressed by a weight that is more existential than material, Seville is linked to the great European pictorial tradition in constant comparison with the modernism of Willem de Kooning and Cy Twombly and the portraiture of Pablo Picasso and Francis Bacon. Workers who don’t do what they’re supposed to do are a constant source of frustration, and one letter describes someone moving a block of marble down a mountain and dying from a broken neck. The volume is dedicated to the work of Jenny Saville (Cambridge, 1970), one of the greatest contemporary painters and a leading voice in the international art scene. It includes photos in her studio, enlargements of the work and clippings from some of her sketch books showing newspaper pictures and medical textbooks, which reveal the source of some of her later images.Withered stumps of time,” “I will show you fear in a handful of dust,” “these fragments I have shored against my ruins. Jenny Saville speaks with Nicholas Cullinan, the director of the National Portrait Gallery, London, from her studio. What the letters reveal to us is that the life force of Michelangelo’s ambition includes the whole process of “taming the mountain” and getting the right marble in the first place—it’s not only sculpting the sculptures and the inner belief that’s involved. A graduate of the Glasgow School of Art in 1992, she has since exhibited, among other museums and galleries, at the Gagosian Galleries in New York and Beverly Hills, the Museo d’Arte Contemporanea in Rome, and the Royal Academy of Art. Great book, great quality in the images, and honestly one of the only sources, besides in person that you will see the work this large.

Not that Saville was the first painter to dwell on the massively/morbidly obese female (Freud's 'carcasses' were startlingly new, Haneline Rogeberg has painted the full figured female for years, etc), but her superimposition of surgical alteration and disease states together with the painterly style of describing flesh are startling and awe inspiring.Conversations with Picasso also covers the wartime period, during which Picasso worked in unheated studios in Paris and panicked about having enough materials to keep working; his driver became his drawing archivist. In this video, Jenny Saville describes the evolution of her practice inside her latest exhibition, Latent , at Gagosian, Paris.

She showed in the Royal Academy of Arts’s famed Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection exhibition in 1997 alongside Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas. Saville transcends the limits between figurative and abstract, between informal and gestural, managing to transfigure the news into a universal image, which puts the human figure at the center of the history of art. The publication was designed to accompany the exhibition of painter Jenny Saville at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art.Her work also outlines a strong correlation with the masters of the Italian Renaissance, in particular with some of Michelangelo’s great masterpieces. Covers are lightly soiled, scuffed and rubbed, with minor wear to edges - rubbing, slight creasing at corners. I really, really wish we could have seen more of her drawings as I think these reveal the real strength of her work.

This was one of the first poems I read that gave me the shock of recognition that great poets offer. This edition, published in 1963, is the complete set of the artist’s surviving letters—some 490 in total. Its stated mission is to provide universal access to all knowledge, like a contemporary Great Library of Alexandria. The imagery is perhaps not for everyone, but I have never yet met a serious painter who has commented disparagingly on her work.Probably one of the few painters in history whose career was launched at her finals show form art school, Saville has established herself as one of the more exciting figurative artists of our time.