Jenny Saville

Saville was born in Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, England.^[2] She went to the Lilley and Stone School (now The Newark Academy) in Newark, Nottinghamshire, for her secondary education.

From 1988 to 1992, Saville earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at the Glasgow School of Art.^[4] While studying there, she was awarded a six-month scholarship to the University of Cincinnati, where she enrolled in a course in women's studies.^[8]: 19 She partially credits her artistic interest in big bodies to the works of Pablo Picasso.^[9]

Summarize Timeline Fact Check

Her early series included large-scale self-portraits and other models.^[1] Charles Saatchi offered Saville an 18-month contract, supporting her while she created new works to be exhibited at the Saatchi Gallery in London. In 1994, the exhibition Young British Artists III showed Saville's self-portrait, Plan (1993), as the signature piece.^[10] As part of the Young British Artists (YBAs) scene, Saville has been noted for her style of figure painting with a contemporary approach.^{[citation needed]}

Since her debut in 1992, Saville's focus has remained on the female body, stating she is "drawn to bodies that emanate a sort of state of in-betweenness: hermaphrodite, a transvestite, a carcass, a half-alive/half-dead head."^[11]

In 1994, Saville observed plastic surgery operations in New York City.^[12] Her published sketches and documents include surgical photographs of liposuction, trauma victims, deformity correction, disease, and transgender patients.^[13] Much of her work features distorted flesh, while others reveal the marks of plastic surgery.

In 2004–2005, Saville collaborated with photographer Glen Luchford to produce large Polaroids of herself taken from below, lying on a sheet of glass.

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.^[14]
• 2009 – Stare (2005) was used for Manic Street Preacher's 2009 album Journal for Plague Lovers.^[15] UK supermarkets stocked the CD in a plain slipcase, after the cover was deemed "inappropriate".^[15] 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".^[15] The album cover art placed second in a 2009 poll for Best Art Vinyl.^[16]

Recent work

In Saville's recent works^[when?], she has employed graphite, charcoal, and pastel to render overlapping figures. 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}

In 2018, Saville's Propped (1992) sold at Sotheby's in London for £9.5 million, above its £3-£4 million estimate,^[6] becoming the most expensive work by a living female artist sold at auction.^[7]

Summarize Fact Check

Materials and Technique

Saville is known for her use of massive canvases, usually six by six feet (1.8 by 1.8 m) or more,^[6] and works with strongly pigmented oil paint, applied in heavy layers.

Saville primarily works on large-scale canvases placed on the floor, using brushes and extended tools to apply and manipulate paint ^[3] to push, smear, and scrape the pigment across the large canvases.^[17] Saville's painting often uses small brushstrokes to build up the paint and soften the imaging. Using this technique, the finish of a painting is matte, but it does not look "dry".^[18]

Visual style

Jenny Saville's post-painterly style^[19] has been compared to that of Lucian Freud^[20] and Rubens.^[21] She frequently utilizes muted colour combinations for her art pieces to create a soft atmosphere that contrasts with her usually intense subject matter.^[18] Other complementary analyses have been proposed on the technique: Kenny Smith of the Scottish Field has commented that Saville's layering of colors and techniques "capture a sense of motion and fluidity. These restless images provide no fixed point, but rather suggest the perception of simultaneous realities."^[22] Saville's technique creates a look that is visceral and fleshy,^[17]with the size of her paintings allowing the viewer to see the details and layering of her signature aesthetic of movement and abstract realism.^[6]

From the beginning of her career, Saville has engaged in the exploration of the body and its historical representation. Saville borrows conventions from a long tradition in figure painting, whether in poses borrowed from Madonna and Child paintings by Leonardo da Vinci, the use of a colour palette reminiscent of Peter Paul Rubens, or the gestural painting of Willem de Kooning in his Woman series. Saville appropriates these techniques associated with male masters to create portraiture from a female point of view.^[23]

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.^[24] Her works often "depict distorted, fleshy, and disquieting female bodies" to provoke the viewer.^[25] "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."^[25]

In 2004, Saville explored the idea of floating gender in her work Passage. Saville is quoted saying "With the transvestite I was searching for a body that was between genders. I had explored that idea a little in Matrix. The idea of floating gender that is not fixed. The transvestite I worked with has a natural penis and false silicone breasts. Thirty or forty years ago this body couldn't have existed and I was looking for a kind of contemporary architecture of the body. I wanted to paint a visual passage through gender – a sort of gender landscape."^[26]

After having children, Saville's subjects and methods became freer, though still revolve around the depiction of bodies. Her references expanded to include motherhood, art history, and ancient myth.^[27]

Themes and Influences

Saville’s work has been read as directed against the fantasy that humans can be the complete authors of their lives.^[5]: 8–9

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".^[28] Her unconventional looks at beauty expand the traditional nude form into a way to comment on the body, gender politics, sexuality, and self-realisation.

Saville plays upon the "ambiguity of embodiment" and what it means to be "feminine" or "beautiful" through the use of the distortion and "disgust".^[25] 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 society.^[25] Scholars like Loren Erdrich argue there is a direct link between the physical body, identity, and the self presented within Saville's subjects.^[29] In an interview for the Saatchi Gallery, Saville comments that she tries to create a balance between abstract and aesthetic effect and realistic depiction of the body in her work.^[26]

• Branded (1992). Oil painting on a 7 ft × 6 ft (2.1 m × 1.8 m) canvas. Saville paints her own face onto an obese female body, the figure in the painting holding folds of her skin which she is seemingly showing off.^[30]
• Plan (1993). Oil painting on a 9 ft × 7 ft (2.7 m × 2.1 m) canvas. A nude female figure with contour lines marked on her body, much like that of a topographical map. Saville said of this work: "The lines on her body are the marks they make before you have liposuction done to you. They draw these things that look like targets. I like this idea of mapping of the body, not necessarily areas to be cut away, but like geographical contours on a map. 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."^[31]
• Closed Contact (1995–1996). She collaborated with artist Glen Luchford to create a series of C-prints depicting a larger female nude lying on plexiglass. The photographs were taken from underneath the glass and depict the female figure very distorted.^[31]
• Hybrid (1997). Oil painting on a 7 ft × 6 ft (2.1 m × 1.8 m) canvas. In this painting, the image looks much like patchwork. Different components of four female bodies are incorporated together to create a unique piece.^[31]
• Fulcrum (1999). Oil painting on an 8+1⁄2 ft × 16 ft (2.6 m × 4.9 m) canvas. Three obese women are piled on a medical trolley. Thin vertical strips of tape have been painted over and then pulled off the canvas, thus creating a sense of geometric measure at odds with the flesh.^[32]
• Hem (1999). Oil painting on a 10 ft × 7 ft (3.0 m × 2.1 m) canvas. This painting depicts a very large nude female with lots of subtle textures implied. The stomach has a glow, while the figure's left side is covered with thick white paint as if by a plaster cast, and her pubic area, painted pink over dark brown, resembles carved and painted wood.^[32]
• Ruben's Flap (1998–1999). Oil painting on a 10 ft × 8 ft (3.0 m × 2.4 m) canvas. This painting depicts Saville herself. She multiplies her body, letting it fill the canvas space as it does in other works, but with a harsh transition from one form to the next. Decisive lines divide the body into square planes and it appears as if she is trying to hide the nakedness with the fragmentation. Saville seems to be struggling to convince herself that the hidden parts of her body are beautiful.^[33]
• Matrix (1999). Oil painting on a 7 ft × 10 ft (2.1 m × 3.0 m) canvas. In this painting, Saville depicts a reclining nude figure with female breasts and genitalia, but with a masculine, bearded face. The genitalia is thrust to the foreground, making it much more of a focus in the picture than the gaze. The arms and legs of the figure are only partly seen, the extremities lying outside the boundary of the picture.^{[34][better source needed]}

Saville's work Propped (1992), which is the most expensive work sold at an auction house by a living female artist, has been described as "one of the undisputed masterpieces of the Young British Artists" by Sotheby's European head of Contemporary Art, Alex Branczik.^[7] This piece is said to be so masterful because it is "the superlative self-portrait that shatters canonised representations of female beauty."^[24]

She is one of two women to have made the top 10 auction lots sold in 2023, alongside Julie Mehretu.^[35]

Saville's artistic style has garnered feedback about her use of detail and engaged discussion about the perception of women.^{[citation needed]} Suzie Mackenzie of The Guardian has expressed that Saville's works are "[a] confrontation with the dynamics of exposure...her exaggerated nudes point up, with an agonising frankness, the disparity between the way women are perceived and the way that they feel about their bodies."^[36] Gallerist Asana Greenstreet has also 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."^[37] 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.^[25]

Solo Exhibitions

More information Year, Title ...

Year	Title	Venue	Location	Notes	Ref.
1999	Territories	Gagosian Gallery	New York
2003	Migrants	Gagosian Gallery	New York		[38]
2005		Museo d'Arte Contemporanea Roma	Rome
2006		Museo Carlo Billoti	Rome
2010		Gagosian Gallery	London
2011	Continuum	Gagosian Gallery	New York
2012	Jenny Saville	Norton Museum of Art	West Palm Beach, Florida	Part of the Norton's RAW series – Recognition of Art by Women
2012	Jenny Saville	Modern Art Oxford			[39][40]
2016	Jenny Saville Drawing	Ashmolean Museum	Venice	Formed the final section of the 'Titian to Canaletto: Drawing in Venice' exhibition. Twenty new works on paper and canvas were produced in response to the Venetian drawings in the exhibition	[41]
2016	Erota	Gagosian Gallery	London	Frawings inspired by the previous "Titian to Canaletto: Drawing in Venice" exhibition.	[42]
2018	Ancestors	Gagosian Gallery	New York		[43][44]
	Jenny Saville	The George Economou Collection	Athens		[45]
2025	Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting	National Portrait Gallery	London		[46]
		Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth			[47]
	Jenny Saville	Albertina Museum	Albertina, Vienna		[48]
2026	Jenny Saville a Ca’ Pesaro	International Gallery of Modern Art	Venice	At 2026 Venice Biennale	[49][50][51]

Close

Group exhibitions

More information Year, Title ...

Year	Title	Venue	Location	Notes	Ref.
1992		Cooling Gallery	London
1994	Young British Artists III	Saatchi Gallery	London
1996	Contemporary British Art '96	Museum of Kalmar	Stockholm
	A Collaboration	Pace/McGill Gallery	New York	In collaboration with Glen Luchford
1997	Sensation	Royal Academy of Art	London
2002	Closed Contact	Gagosian Gallery	Beverly Hills	In collaboration with Glen Luchford
2004	Large Scale Polaroids by Jenny Saville and Glen Luchford	University of Massachusetts Amherst, East Gallery	Massachusetts
2014	Egon Schiele - Jenny Saville	Kunsthaus Zürich	Zürich
2018	Now	Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art	Edinburgh	During the Edinburgh Art Festival	[52]

Close

• Gagosian Gallery, Member of the Board of Directors (since 2022)^[53]