Jenny Saville is a contemporary artist and an original member of the Young British Artists (YBAs) whose larger-than-life self-portraits, drawings, and paintings of fleshy women embrace the grotesque and challenge the male gaze that has dominated art history for centuries.
Read MoreBy transcending the boundaries of contemporary figurative painting, Saville reinvigorates the genre and raises questions about societal perceptions of the body and its potential.
Born in Cambridge, England, Saville received her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from The Glasgow School of Art in 1992.
While undertaking a six-month scholarship at the University of Cincinnati, she enrolled in a course in Women's Studies, where she was exposed to renowned feminist writers and discourses around gender politics. Her studies focused her interest in the 'imperfections' of flesh, with its societal implications and taboos, influencing the kind of physicality she has explored in her artwork since.
Saville credits her interest in corpulent bodies to the work of Titian, Tintoretto, and Pablo Picasso, as well as classical and Renaissance sculpture. She also spent time viewing cadavers in a morgue and once observed a plastic surgeon at work.
Best known for her monumental portraits of fat female figures, Saville invokes a deep fascination for the tangible qualities of flesh and the extremities of anatomy, combined with the deft handling of her chosen medium: paint.
Challenging the limitations of both classical figuration and modern abstraction, the artist administers oil paint to the canvas in thick, visceral layers, each brushstroke becoming almost as palpable as flesh itself.
Saville's portraits are defined by an exaggerated realism, emphasising folds of flesh, visible veins, and reddened skin and embodying a 'feminist aesthetics of disgust', as per art historian Michelle Meagher. As she manipulates the picture surface, the separation between living bodies and their painted representation begins to collapse. By using purposefully foreshortened perspectives, Saville underscores the solidity and power of the female form.
In the oil painting Fulcrum (1999), which measures more than four metres across, three reclining female bodies appear to merge into a singular mass, rendered in bruised blues and purples and ruddy flesh tones. As boundaries between the forms disappear, navigating the composition and distinguishing between the figures becomes difficult, speaking to the overlapping narratives of existence that Saville seeks to capture in her portraits. The body, her paintings insist, is never neutral, but is rather constantly capable of change.
Where Renaissance masters pursued an ideal of beauty, Saville projects the power that bodies hold. Propped (1992), the nude self-portrait of the artist seated on a stool that launched her career, is at once beautiful, vulnerable, and verging on abjection, interrogating prescribed notions of beauty with its vivid depiction of corpulence.
In Richard Calvocoressi's analysis of her work, Saville describes her drawings as 'layered realties.' By building up different poses within a single sketch, limbs and figures begin to intertwine and unexpected forms emerge. This is the case in the charcoal drawing Muse on Stool (Study) (2015), where the model's shadowy limbs proliferate as they shift position.
Whether life-sized sketches of intertwined figures with erotic undertones like Reflective Flesh Study (Red) (2015) or smaller studies of the artist's own pregnant body, Saville's drawings have a sculptural quality to them. Forms coalesce, dissolve, and reappear as the eye wanders across the surface of the paper, as if moving around a three-dimensional sculpture.
Jenny Saville has been the subject of both solo and group exhibitions.
Solo exhibitions include Jenny Saville, Museo Novecento, Museo degli Innocenti, Museo di Casa Buonarroti, Museo di Palazzo Vecchio, and Museo dell'Opera del Duomo, Florence (2021); Jenny Saville Drawing: A Contemporary Response to Drawing in Venice, Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, University of Oxford (2015); and Jenny Saville, Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach (2011).
Group exhibitions include Hong Kong Exchange, Gagosian, Hong Kong (2021); An Exhibition For Notre-Dame, Gagosian, Paris (2019); and All Too Human: Bacon, Freud and a Century of Painting Life, Tate Britain, London (2018).
Jenny Saville paintings have been up for auction multiple times, with realised prices ranging between US $1,085 to US $12 million and beyond. In 2018, the artist's ground-breaking self-portrait Propped (1992) sold at Sotheby's London for US $12,497,949, making it the most expensive work by a living female artist at the time.
Jenny Saville's Instagram can be found here.
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