Jenny Saville

Jennifer Anne Saville RA (born 7 May 1970)^[1] is an English figurative painter and an original member of the Young British Artists.^[2][3] Saville lives and works in Oxford, England,^[4] and she is noted for her sizable nudes of unconventional female subjects. Some credit her with originating a new method of painting the female nude for contemporary art.^{[5]: 26–29}

Recurring figures depicted in her work range from mothers, children, transgender people, burn victims, and cosmetic surgery patients.^[5] Although her works subvert many beauty standards and invoke contemporary feminist theories, she often invokes art historical references in her paintings.^[6]

As of 2018, she is regarded as the "Most Expensive Living Female Artist" after her work Propped (1992) sold at Sotheby’s Auction House for £67.3 Million.^[7]

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

From 1988–1992, Saville gained her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at 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]

Her first series of paintings consisted of large-scale portraits of herself and other models.^[1] Charles Saatchi offered the artist 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 (YBA) scene, Saville has been noted for her style of figure painting with a contemporary approach.

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.

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]

In Saville's recent works, she employs graphite, charcoal, and pastel to render overlapping figures. These works are reminiscent of traditional under-drawings, 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}

Later, 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]

Saville's paintings are usually six by six feet (1.8 by 1.8 m) or more, and the paints used are often strongly pigmented.^[6] Her post-painterly style^[17] has been compared to that of Lucian Freud^[18] and Rubens.^[19]

Saville sometimes paints with her canvas on the floor; she also uses brushes on wooden broom-handles.^[3]

Saville's often uses small brushstrokes to build up the painting and soften the imaging. Using this technique, the finish of a painting is matte, but it does not look "dry".^[20] She also frequently utilizes muted colour combinations for her art pieces that create a soft atmosphere free of harshness that contrasts with, usually, intense subject matter .^[20] 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."^[21] Saville works with oil paint, applied in heavy layers. She pushes, smears, and scrapes the pigment over large-scale canvases, the paint becoming visceral and fleshy.^[22] Saville is also known for her use of massive canvases which allow the viewer to see the details and layering of oil paints to create her signature aesthetic of movement and abstract realism.^[6]

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

Traditionally, Jenny Saville's nudes have been studied from the gender perspective defying "the traditional aspects of beauty and femininity. In fact, most of her nudes represent overweight or bruised women... constant struggle between the female body and the body ideals contemporary pop culture has been trying to force upon it" (Marilia Kaisar).^[23] 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.^[24] 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.^[25]

Her unconventional looks at beauty expands the traditional nude form into a way to comment on the body, gender politics, sexuality, and self-realisation. Her works often "depict distorted, fleshy, and disquieting female bodies" to provoke the viewer.^[24] Saville’s luscious yet grotesque treatment of painted bodies have elicited comparisons to Lucian Freud. "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."^[24] 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."^[26] Saville plays upon the "ambiguity of embodiment" and what it means to be "feminine" or "beautiful" through the use of the distortion and "disgust".^[24] 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.^[24] The primary subject of all of Saville’s early works is the artist herself, and indeed Saville has almost exclusively painted female subjects since.^[27]

Saville seeks to break down the social conventions that encourage women to fit into limiting beauty standards. Scholars like Loren Erdrich argue there is a direct link between the physical body, identity, and the self presented within Saville's subjects.^[28] Through her paintings, Saville depicts beauty and subjectivity in bodies that have been traditionally seen as grotesque.^[20] Saville has 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".^[29] Gallerist Asana Greenstreet has 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."^[30]

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.^[31]

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."^[25]

• 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.^[32]
• 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."^[33]
• 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.^[33]
• 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.^[33]
• 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.^[34]
• 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 painted wood.^[34]
• 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.^[35]
• 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.^[36]

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."^[27]

She is one of two women to have made the top 10 auction lots sold in 2023, alongside Julie Mehretu.^[37]

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

• Jenny Saville, Organized by Cheryl Brutvan, Texts by Cheryl Brutvan and Nicholas Cullinan, Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, Florida, 2011.

• Royal Academy of Arts profile page
• Jenny Saville at Gagosian Gallery
• Jenny Saville at the Saatchi Gallery
• Jenny Saville on Widewalls.ch
• at the Norton Museum of Art
• Saville on artfact.com
• Saville in the New York Times