Egon Schiele Self-Portrait with Raised Bare Shoulder, 1912 Leopold Museum, Vienna
The distinctive works of Austrian artist Egon Schiele (1890 – 1918), produced in less than a decade, confront the large paintings and drawings by British artist Jenny Saville (*1970). This is a meeting between two young stars, separated by many years and divergent artistic methods, who consistently distil in their work a strong sense of the body as the locus of lived experience. Schiele's poses, deliberately low angles and painterly style imbue his mostly small-scale self-portraits with a concentrated strength that is every bit as intense as that of Saville's gigantic formats. Indeed, it is this stark difference in size that constitutes the visual challenge of presenting two positions in painting that for all their apparent expressionism are calculated down to the smallest brushstroke.
