Continuum
Book cover Design for Jenny Saville's collection Continuum
PROJECT
Jenny Saville is a world class artist who is renowned for her large scale paintings of obesity and tumescent flesh. Saville is the most expensive living female artist in history, selling her 1992 piece “Propped” for $12.4 million USD in 2018. Highly provocative and profound, her work forces the viewer to examine their relationship with the grotesque and reevaluate societal influence on body image and the abject female form.
CHALLENGE
The mandate was to design a book for Jenny Saville’s Continuum collection. The beautiful challenge of this assignment was to create a vehicle for Saville’s work that could simultaneously express the meticulous depth as well as the size of her pieces.
SOLUTION
Understanding the scale of her work, I chose a large landscape format to maximize the available visual area and then spread her piece across the jacket, uninterrupted by type. Wanting to emphasize the voyeur / exhibitionist relationship between Saville and her audience, I chose to use a clear acetate for the dust jacket. It acts as a veil while revealing the bulbous body portrayed in the piece. The use of solid black bars was a facetious allusion to censorship, a concept which Saville so adeptly renders irrelevant. Extended type was chosen for the titles to assert the space and confidence exuded by Saville in her bombastic work. The ultra-light condensed type for the collection name was chosen to signify the intentionality and precision involved in Saville’s creation processes. The result is a book that invites the reader to interact with their relationship with the morbid curiosity of disgust.