Elips

Elpis is the book Gagosian published for Jenny Saville’s exhibition of new portraits at its 980 Madison Avenue gallery in New York, which ran from November 12 to December 22, 2020.

The 66-page hardcover documents the twelve large paintings in the show, with photographs of Saville’s studio and reference material, and it prints a poem by Anna Akhmatova. Peter Willberg designed it, and it came out in 2021. The exhibition reopened the gallery after the pandemic shutdown of March 2020. Its title is the ancient Greek personification of hope, the spirit left at the bottom of Pandora’s box, whom the gallery describes as traditionally linked to the burdens of human suffering.

The ancient world is one of Saville’s enduring sources. In her 2014 solo exhibition Oxyrhynchus at Gagosian in London, she layered silhouettes and fleshly forms in large canvases that allude to the documents found at the Egyptian site of that name.