The combination of figurative and abstract forms in painting: The case of Jenny Saville

The art of painting has passed through many stages in its history. While some developments changed the direction of the art of painting, some developments caused dark periods in the art of painting. We can say that the art of painting begins with abstractions. In this process, figurative applications are symbolic and conceptual. Perspective laws, which isseen to be used in Ancient Greek art at first, reached competence in the Renaissance, and left the place of bodily-full fiction to spatial-deep fiction in painting. In this fiction, all forms are arranged according to a single-focused view, and the pictorial material serves to create the illusion. In the p eriod that before the beginning of modern art, the figurative understanding in Western art has evolved into Naturalism, which is defined as capturing the external reality as much as possible. The name of Modern art, which starts to be influential in the early 20th century, is mentioned with abstract art. This is a period in which all acquisitions of figurative painting such as illusion, visual narrative, and lightshadow are abandoned, and the universal ideal reality is sought instead of external reality.Especially the New York school, Abstract-Expressionism has cleared out figurative painting. The concept of ready-made object, which came to the fore with Pop-Art in 1960, the structuralist approach of Conceptual art in the 1970s, the fact that its material is language and in the context of the signifier-signified, the signifier is associated with artistic form, and the emphasis that form is not needed in art production has brought the art of painting to the p oint of termination. On the other hand, A. C. Danto puts forward the thesis that the end is not the art of painting, but its developmental history, and argues that the process of forwardlooking will no longer work and that a transhistorical process has begun in the art of painting. Transhistorical painting accepts that the understanding of painting is at an equal level in every style and in every period of history, no period is ahead or behind the other. In such an environment in the 1980s, artists who set out under the name of Neo Expressionist Art saying canvas, repaint, renarrative, want to fill the gap which created by Abstract-Expressionist and Conceptual Art in painting art, and make painting art the center of attention again. Jenny Savill is nominated as for being among the Neo-Expressionist artists. Tracing the figural structuring in her works will be illuminating about the figural structuring of the art of painting, its historical process and its current state. A transhistorical approach is seen in the figural structuring of the artist's works, so traditional influences have not been abandoned. She has a multiple space-time narrative with the use of images that will correspond to the multifocal vision. Beside that, She uses different approaches in an eclectic manner simultaneously. Figurative and abstract forms remain together. In the paintings, the transition from one trend to another or since the fiction is consisting of transparent layers creates the effect of a process instead of being finished or completed in the p aintings. With this aspect, the paintings, which are revealing artefacts, enable the viewer to reproduce with their creative imagination and emotion, and thus to assume a more active role. In this study, it is revealed that the formation and the development process of Jenyy Saville's paintings by focusing on the figural structuring. In the study, in accordance with the qualitative research method, the work analyzes is made through the data obtained by scanning the documents which consisting of observation and interview records, expert writings and comments about the artist, and the data which also supported by the concepts and theories obtained through content analysis.