Jenny Saville will be subject of a major new show at Venice’s International Gallery of Modern Art at Ca’ Pesaro, marking the celebrated British painter’s first major exhibition in Opening March 28, 2026, it will run through November 22, alongside the illustrious Venice Biennale, the 61st edition of which opens in May.
Featuring around 30 paintings that trace the artist’s career from the 1990s to present, the show follows her critically acclaimed retrospective at London’s National Portrait Gallery earlier this year, which traveled to Fort Worth’s Modern Art Museum and is on view through January 18. The Venice exhibition will include seminal works like (1999) and (2002–13), both of which are on view in Fort Worth and are prime examples of Saville’s superior use of paint and scale to render the human body at once grotesque and tender. Later works echo Baroque masters, like the pietà-like (2018).
Jenny Saville, Reverse (2002-2003). © Jenny Saville. All rights reserved, DACS 2025. Courtesy of Gagosian.
Saville said it’s a “great honor” to show in Venice, “a place where art is an intrinsic part of everyday life and where the Biennale artists of today sit in dialogue with these great Venetian artworks.”
Widely considered a Modern master of figuration, Saville’s work has recently been in conversation with the Old Masters at Gagosian‘s Art Basel Paris booth, where one of her latest canvases was positioned opposite the 17th-century by Peter Paul Rubens.
Saville came to fame with the Young British Artists (YBAs) in the early ’90s with her painterly Rubenesque figures that foregrounded flesh in all of its delights and discontents, calling into question society’s expectations of beauty and womanhood. The 1992 painting became the most expensive artwork by a living woman artist to sell at auction when it went for $12.4 million at Sotheby’s London in 2018; she was unseated by Marlene Dumas earlier this year.
Jenny Saville, Byzantium (2018). © Jenny Saville. All rights reserved, DACS 2025. Photo: Mike Bruce. Courtesy of Gagosian.
Her exquisite use of light and color to render the visceralities of the human body are of course what Saville is best known for, a skill that one could argue links her to greats like Titian and Tintoretto of the Venetian School of painting. Indeed, the final room of the Ca’ Pesaro exhibition will present a new series of works created by the artist in homage to the lagoon city.
Ca’ Pesaro is housed in a palazzo on Venice’s Grand Canal and showcases 19th- and 20th-century painting and sculpture. It’s one of 11 museums run by the Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia The upcoming show will be curated by the gallery’s director, Elisabetta Barisoni, and is supported by Gagosian.
“This exhibition marks Jenny Saville’s return to Venice, a city she loves, has visited many times, and is rich in the work of the old Venetian masters that she has studied for many years,” Barisoni said.
Source: Exhibition - news.artnet.com
