Jenny Saville, Richey Edwards

NOW, an exhibition by Cambridge-born painter Jenny Saville, is being hosted by the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (Modern One,) from Saturday 24 March 2018 - Sunday 16 September 2018.

​A member of Young British Artists, a loose collective who first exhibited together in 1988, she trained at Glasgow School of Art. Her first exhibition in Scotland, this remarkable event showcases her idiosyncratic, depictions of the human form, particularly female nudes. (She has been credited with originating a pioneering and challenging method of reinventing figure painting in contemporary art). Her painting, Propped (1992) sold at Sotheby's for £9.5 million, well over its £3-4 million estimate, making it the most expensive painting by a living female artist sold at auction.

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Saville painted the album covers for Manic Street Preachers’ 3rd album THE HOLY BIBLE (Epic 1994) and their 9th, JOURNAL FOR PLAGUE LOVERS (Columbia, 2009). For the latter, she painted a boy’s face apparently splattered with blood. When this was censored by Sainsbury's, Tesco and Asda, vocalist James Dean Bradfield commented, “You can have lovely shiny buttocks and guns everywhere in the supermarket on covers of magazines and CDs, but you show a piece of art and people just freak out.”
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JOURNAL FOR PLAGUE LOVERS is their only album where all the lyrics were written by founder member Richey Edwards. Edwards was renowned for his dark, politicised writing, and was cited as a leading lyricist of his generation. Plagued by severe depression, often leading to bouts of self-harm, Edwards disappeared on 1 February 1995. The band always perform with an open mic occupying the rhythm guitar position on stage as a memorial.