Jenny Saville

Materials and technique

Saville is known for her use of large canvases, usually six by six feet (1.8 by 1.8 m) or more.^[6] She usually paints these by placing them on the floor and using brushes and extended tools to apply and manipulate paint, pushing, smearing, and scraping the pigment across the canvases.^[3][20]

Saville's work is also known for her use of strongly pigmented oil paint applied in heavy layers.^{[citation needed]} Kenny Smith of the Scottish Field commented that Saville's layering of colours and techniques "capture a sense of motion and fluidity. These restless images provide no fixed point, but rather suggest the perception of simultaneous realities."^[21] Saville's technique creates a look that is visceral and fleshy,^[20] with the size of her paintings allowing the viewer to see the details and layering of her aesthetic of movement and abstract realism.^[6] Saville's "post-painterly style"^[22] has been compared to that of Lucian Freud^[23] and Rubens.^[24] Her work has also been compared to the gestural painting of Willem de Kooning in his Woman series.^{[citation needed]}

Saville often uses small brushstrokes to build up the paint and soften the image.^{[citation needed]} Using this technique, the finish of her paintings are matte without appearing "dry".^[25] She frequently uses muted colour combinations for her work to create a soft atmosphere that contrasts with her usually intense subject matter.^[25] In an interview for the Saatchi Gallery, Saville commented that she tries to create a balance between abstract and aesthetic effect and realistic depiction of the body in her work.^[17]

Saville also sometimes cuts into the layered paint on the canvas. In Plan (1993), which explores themes of plastic surgery, for example, she says "I didn't draw onto the body. I wanted the idea of cutting into the paint. Like you would cut into the body. It evokes the idea of surgery. It has lots of connotations."^[14]

In Saville's later works,^[when?] she has used graphite, charcoal, and pastel to render overlapping figures.^{[citation needed]} These works are reminiscent of traditional underdrawings and illustrate themes of movement, hybridity, and gender ambiguity.^[8]: 24 Saville states, "If I draw through previous bodily forms in an arbitrary or contradictory way...it gives the work a kind of life force or Eros. Destruction, regeneration, a cyclic rhythm of emerging forms".^{[8]: 21–22}

Subject matter

The primary subject of Saville's works are the female nude and figuration, with the majority of all of Saville’s early works being the artist herself, and having almost exclusively painted female subjects since.^[18] Her works often "depict distorted, fleshy, and disquieting female bodies" to provoke the viewer.^[26] "I paint flesh because I'm human", she has said. "If you work in oil, as I do, it comes naturally. Flesh is just the most beautiful thing to paint."^[26]

Saville seeks to break down the social conventions that encourage women to fit into limiting beauty standards, having expressed issues regarding the prevalence of generally accepted standards of beauty: "A lot of women [are] made to fear their own excess, taken in by the cult of exercise, the great quest to be thin. The rhetoric used against obesity makes it sound far worse than alcohol or smoking, yet they can do you far more damage".^[27] In this vein she has also looked at plastic surgery in her work, for example, in Plan (1993), which shows the marks made on a body before having liposuction done.^[14]

Saville plays upon the "ambiguity of embodiment" and what it means to be "feminine" or "beautiful" through the use of the distortion and "disgust".^[26] Gallerist Asana Greenstreet commented that Saville performs "explorations of people that are both intimate and uncomfortable. Through detailed, frank and unapologetic investigations of the human body, dialogues occur between past and present, and are animated by questions of gender, suffering, and ambiguity."^[28] This "aesthetic of disgust" frequently pushes viewers to view and confront conceptions of women in Western society, giving some the autonomy to decide their own standard of beauty beyond this.^[26] Michelle Meagher writes that Saville sees standards of "beauty and pleasure [as] deeply embedded within Western [culture]", yet, she constantly tries to challenge these assumptions of the body and beauty.^[26] Scholars like Loren Erdrich argue there is a direct link between the physical body, identity, and the self presented within Saville's subjects.^[29] Suzie Mackenzie of The Guardian described Saville's work as frankly describing the disparity between the way women are perceived and the way that they feel about their bodies."^[30]

After having children, Saville's subjects and methods opened up, though still revolve around the depiction of bodies. Her references expanded to include motherhood, art history, and ancient myth.^[31] Saville’s work has been read as directed against the fantasy that humans can be the complete authors of their lives.^[5]: 8–9

Influences

Saville partially credits her artistic interest in big bodies to the works of Pablo Picasso.^[32]

From the beginning of her career, Saville has engaged in the exploration of the body and its historical representation.^[9] Saville borrows conventions from a long tradition in figure painting, including using poses borrowed from Madonna and Child paintings by Leonardo da Vinci, as well as techniques associated with other male masters to create portraiture from a female point of view, and referencing a wide range of other art historical sources including antique and Hindu sculpture, to Renaissance drawing and painting, to the work of modern artists such as Henri Matisse, Willem de Kooning, and Pablo Picasso.^[9][33] Her views on beauty expand the traditional nude form into a way to comment on the body, gender politics, sexuality, and self-realisation.

Saville has created exhibitions of work directly inspired by historical artists and artworks. In 2016, her solo exhibition Jenny Saville Drawing: A Contemporary Response to Drawing in Venice, at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, was the final section of the Titian to Canaletto: Drawing in Venice exhibition, where twenty new works on paper and canvas were produced in response to the Venetian drawings in the exhibition.^[34] In the same year, her show Erota at London's Gagosian Gallery showed drawings also inspired by this exhibition.^[35]

Solo

Group

Album covers

Saville's paintings have appeared on two album covers:

• 1994 – Strategy (South Face/Front Face/North Face) appeared on the cover of Manic Street Preachers' third album The Holy Bible.^[69]
• 2009 – Stare (2005) was used for Manic Street Preacher's 2009 album Journal for Plague Lovers.^[70] UK supermarkets stocked the CD in a plain slipcase, after the cover was deemed "inappropriate".^[70] The band's James Dean Bradfield said the decision was "utterly bizarre and commented,: "You can have lovely shiny buttocks and guns everywhere in the supermarket on covers of magazines and CDs, but you show a piece of art and people just freak out".^[70] The album cover art was placed second in a 2009 poll for Best Art Vinyl.^[71]