The other evening I went to the opening of Anselm Keifer's show at the French Academy, the Villa Medici, in the heart of Rome. http://www.villamedici.it/ita/home.cfm (in Italian, so hit mostre, and 2005, and also see longer piece in English on this pdf. http://www.villamedici.it/privato/articoli/28/inglese/com.stp.%20Eng.kiefer.pdf )

A truly spectacular setting; Keats, who lived by the Spanish Steps below, might have died for this alone: a vast moon over a Renaissance gardens blazing with candles, and a crisp winter's night in which Rome was iilluminated below. The chill tensed the air suitably for Keifer's enigmatic "Die Frauen" or "The Women" which had us weaving a path along dimly lit corridors, up and down staircases, into confined spaces, in and out of the gardens. Kiefer (b. Germany, 1945) gave us fragments of great female icons, from French queens to mythological figures, the evidence presented in drawings, installations and sculptures. Names were charcoaled onto walls, timelined into history; billowing white dresses were made sculptural, their movement - and narratives - caught mid-flow. Elsewhere lead was formed into a row of softly-bowled out sarcophigi, lidded with water or bearing offerings of plants. There was much interaction between material that is usually fluid - textile, mercury, water - represented as hard surface, while lead retained an ambiguity, its softness eased into shapes. Keifer's written words were immediate, the letters smudged, corrected, on white walls. Always spontaneous. Many of the pieces had not been seen before, and were created by Keifer, said the curators, 'in loco'.

Michael Shanks, David Platt, and William Rathje write about Kiefer's work in a paper called "The Pursuit of Garbage: modernity and the archaeological". See http://traumwerk.stanford.edu/~mshanks/writing/M-M-Garbage.pdf - They write: "Anselm Keifer's landscapes are far from the picturesque: they concentrated upon sites of historical events and processes that are far from comforting, imbued instead with Postwar German guilt, testaments to the death and debris of history".

"Far from comforting" are words often used to described the work of an outstanding young British painter, Jenny Saville,

whose work is also on view in Rome just now. The opening night at MACRO Museo d'Arte Contemporaneo Roma http://www.macro.roma.museum/english/exhibitions/index.html marked Saville's first showing in Rome, and proved as interesting for the faces of the viewers taking in the provocative, often disturbing, images on the walls: transexuals, gigantic faces displaying wounds, or the traces of beatings, or perhaps surgery; a portrait of Saville and her sister facing us like a strange two-headed child, but always a tenderness in the moment of capture. A corpse of a pig, its teats alone painted so deftly that one art critic, a long-time fan who had travelled from Milan to see her work for the first time, was left gasping beside me: "Like Velasquez".

Saville was projected to fame in the early 90s, as one of Charles Saatchi's Young British Artists; she took part in "Sensation" the controversial show which travelled to Brooklyn Museum of Art in 1999 (See http://archive.salon.com/ent/feature/1999/10/02/dung/index1.html).

Since then Saville has established herself amongst an art-critical name-set which includes Bacon and Lucien Freud, taking the body as a subject to new extremes, and exposing, quite literally, its various anatomies. Saville has a studio in Palermo, Sicily, and some of the work on show in Rome was inspired by the colour and rawness of the local meat market. The headless, anonymous, pig body is stretched over the canvas, its mottled sub-cutaneous fat mirrored in thick layers of paint (a technique Saville used with great impact in her earlier paintings of corpulent females, some which remind of the prehistoric Willendorf Venus). Just a note: I went through an interesting edit process when deciding what images to post here from the show: as Salon's critic noted, they have to be seen for real. (Not least I found myself to be particularly self-conscious looking at the CD provided by MACRO - the same graphic images I had seen on the walls - in a public internet cafe).

Saville's realism serves as a reminder, again, of the bodily traces lost over time, the visceral and the tactile qualities of the human form which seep away...Saville's work at MACRO is counterpointed by that of Nunzio, an Italian sculptor, whose subtle works in wood - dark greys, browns and blacks - reminded me of familar territory, bog oak and the charred remainders of ancient hearths from the archaeologists' find-palette.