Jenny Saville

Jennifer Saville is a contemporary British painter and an original member of the Young British Artists —a loose group of visual artists who first began to exhibit together in London in 1988. Many of the YBA artists graduated from the BA Fine Art course at Goldsmiths, in the late 1980s, whereas some from the group had trained at Royal College of Art. The scene began around a series of artist-led exhibitions held in warehouses and factories, beginning in 1988 with the Damien Hirst-led Freeze and, in 1990, East Country Yard Show and Modern Medicine. They are noted for ‘shock tactics’, use of throwaway materials, wild living, and an attitude ‘both oppositional and entrepreneurial’. They achieved considerable media coverage and dominated British art during the 1990s; internationally reviewed shows in the mid-1990s included Brilliant and Sensation. Many of the artists were initially supported and their works collected by Charles Saatchi (born 1943). Leading artists of the group include Damien Hirst (born 1965) and Tracey Emin (born 1963). Key works include Hirst’s The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991, Tiger shark, glass, steel, 5% formaldehyde solution, 213 × 518 × 213 cm), a shark preserved in formaldehyde in a vitrine; Saville’s Plan (1993, oil on canvas, 274 x 213 cm) and Emin’s My Bed (1998, mattress, linens, pillows and objects, 79 x 211 x 234 cm), a dishevelled double bed surrounded by detritus.

Saville works and lives in Oxford, England and she is known for her large-scale painted depictions of nude women. Saville has been credited with originating a new and challenging method of painting the female nude and reinventing figure painting for contemporary art. Some paintings are of small dimensions, while other are of much larger scale. Monumental subjects come from pathology textbooks that she has studied that informed her on injury to bruise, burns, and deformity. John Gray (born 1948, English political philosopher and author with interests in analytic philosophy, the history of ideas and philosophical pessimism. He retired in 2008 as School Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics and political Science) commented:

As I see it, Jenny Saville’s work expresses a parallel project of reclaiming the body from personality. Saville worked with many models who underwent cosmetic surgery to reshape a portion of their body. In doing that, she captures ‘marks of personality for the flesh’ and together embraces how we can be the writers of our own lives.

Saville was born in Cambridge, England and gained her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at Glasgow School of Art (1988–1992). She was then awarded a six-month scholarship to the University of Cincinnati where she enrolled in a course in women’s studies. Saville was exposed to gender political ideas and renowned feminist writers. During her time in Cincinnati, she saw a lot of big women in shorts and t-shirts. This was the kind of physicality that she found herself interested in. She partially credits her interest in big bodies to Pablo Picasso (1881 - 1973), an artist that she sees as a painter that made his subjects solid and permanent.

At the end of Saville’s undergraduate education, the leading British art collector, Charles Saatchi, saw her work at Clare Henry’s Critics Choice exhibition at the Cooling Gallery in Cork St and purchased a painting. Her first series of paintings consisted of large scale portraits of Saville and other models. He offered the artist an 18-month contract, supporting her while she created new works to be exhibited in the Saatchi Gallery in London. The collection, Young British Artists III, exhibited in 1994 with Saville’s self-portrait, Plan as the signature piece. Rising quickly to critical and public recognition and emerging as part of the YBA scene, Saville has been noted for creating art through the use of a classical standard —figure painting, but with a contemporary approach.

Since her debut in 1992, Saville’s focus has remained on the female body. She has stated, ‘I’m drawn to bodies that emanate a sort of state of in-betweenness: hermaphrodite, a transvestite, a carcass, a half-alive/half-dead head.’ In 1994, Saville spent many hours observing plastic surgery operations in New York City. Her published sketches and documents include surgical photographs of liposuction, trauma victims, deformity correction, disease states and transgender patients. Much of her work features distorted flesh, high-caliber brush strokes, and patches of oil colour, while others reveal the surgeon’s mark of a plastic surgery operation or white ‘target’ rings. Her paintings are usually much larger than life-size, usually six-by-six feet or more. They are strongly pigmented and give a highly sensual impression of the surface of the skin as well as the mass of the body. Saville’s post-painterly style has been compared to that of Rubens (1577 - 1640) and Lucian Freud (1922 - 2011).

Between 1995 and 1996, she collaborated with photographer Glen Luchford (born 1968) to produce huge Polaroids of herself taken from below, lying on a sheet of glass. Luchford is a well-known fashion photographer who worked for Gucci, Calvin Klein, and Prada. Saville wanted to use someone with Luchford’s high fashion background to capture her interpretations of the female form.

In 2004, Saville then 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.

Saville’s more recent work, sees the artist employing graphite, charcoal, and pastel to explore overlapping forms suggestive of underdrawings, movement, hybridity, and gender ambiguity. 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’.

In 2018 Saville’s Propped (1992, oil on canvas, 213.4 x 182.9 cm) sold at Sotheby’s in London for £9.5 million, above its £3-£4 million estimate, becoming the most expensive work by a living female artist sold at auction. She is also one of two women to have made the top 10 auction lots sold in 2023. Saville’s work was included in the 2022 exhibition Women Painting Women at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas, U.S.A. and the same year she was appointed Member of the Board of Directors at the Gagosian Gallery.

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