Closed Contact

From the beginning of her career, Jenny Saville has engaged in an intense exploration of the body and its representation. Saville borrows conventions from a long tradition in figure painting, whether in poses borrowed from Madonna and Child paintings by Leonardo da Vinci (1452 - 1519), the use of a colour palette reminiscent of Sir Peter Paul Rubens (1577 - 1640), the gestural painting of Willem de Kooning’s (1904 - 1997)Woman series or the thick impasto of Lucian Freud (1922 - 2011). Saville appropriates these techniques associated with male masters to show her own point of view as a woman.

Representations of the body is an important aspect of Jenny Saville’s work and her stylised nude portraits of voluminous female bodies have brought her international acclaim. She attributes most of her style and subjects to this theme of representations. Her work Propped (1992, oil on canvas, 213.4 x 182.9 cm), the most expensive work sold at an auction house by a living female artist and described by Alex Branczik (Sothebys’ European head of Contemporary Art) as ‘one of the undisputed masterpieces of the Young British Artists’, is said to be so masterful because it is ‘the superlative self-portrait that shatters canonized representations of female beauty.’ In an interview for the Saatchi Gallery, Saville said:

I have to really work at the tension between getting the paint to have the sensory quality that I want and be constructive in terms of building the form of a stomach, for example, or creating the inner crevice of a thigh. The more I do it, the more the space between abstraction and figuration becomes interesting. I want a painting realism. I try to consider the pace of a painting, of active and quiet areas.

Saville’s art focuses on women’s bodies as the predominant subject matter and is a far cry away from other works of the female form, which have traditionally objectified women. She is more interested in the raw and unaltered female form and the valuable reactions of disgust which are generated when viewing her pieces. Her body of work therefore challenges traditional representations of nude women and also the modern-day filtered and perfect body image, encouraged by social media. Saville does this by focusing on the bumps, dimples, rolls and contours of women’s bodies and flesh, representing some insecurities and imperfections, that have been excluded in depictions of nude women traditionally.

Jenny Saville’s nudes have often 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, ‘An analysis of the feminist nude through the work of Jenny Saville’, article in Medium, 2018. Subtracted from the thesis Three aspects of the feminist nude, [originally titled: Τρείς εκδοχές του φεμινιστικού γυμνού] Chapter 7C: An analysis of the feminist nude through the work of Jenny Saville, p. 104–125). Michelle Meagher writes (in ‘Jenny Saville and a Feminist Aesthetics of Disgust,’ A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, vol. 18, no. 4) 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.

Her nonconventional looks at beauty expands the traditional nude form into a way to comment on the body, gender politics, sexuality, and even self-realization. As pointed out by Meagher, Saville’s works often ‘depict distorted, fleshy, and disquieting female bodies’ to provoke interest, confusion, questions, and excitement. Saville’s luscious yet grotesque treatment of painted bodies have elicited comparisons to Lucian Freud. ‘I paint flesh because I’m human, she once told artnet. ‘If you work in oil, as I do, it comes naturally. Flesh is just the most beautiful thing to paint.’ Suzie Mackenzie has written (in ‘Under the skin’, The Guardian, 22 October 2005) about ‘A confrontation with the dynamics of exposure […] her exaggerated nudes point up, with an agonizing frankness, the disparity between the way women are perceived and the way that they feel about their bodies’. The primary subject of all of Saville’s early works is the artist herself, and indeed throughout her oeuvre she has almost exclusively painted female subjects. Scholars like Loren Erdrich argue there is a direct link between the physical body, identity, and the self presented within Saville’s subjects.

Society shapes and seeks to control behaviour, relationships, and power. Saville, however, breaks down the social conventions that encourage women to fit into limiting beauty standards. Saville’s subject, non-idealized bodies, have been understood as superposition of mental and emotional mindsets. Through the mediation of paint, Saville restores beauty and subjectivity to bodies that have been in what is seen as grotesque. In her own words: ‘A lot of women out there look and feel like that, 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’.

In their collaborative series, Closed Contact (1995 – 1996), painter Jenny Saville and fashion photographer Glen Luchford defy the male gaze and challenge deeply entrenched cultural assumptions about feminine beauty.

After observing reconstructive and aesthetic surgery during a 1994 fellowship in Connecticut, Saville became fascinated with the violence and viscerality of reconfigured flesh. The experience laid the groundwork for this series of work. The artists met in the mid-1990s when British Vogue commissioned Luchford to take a portrait of Saville. During this meeting, Luchford shot Saville as she pressed her face against a piece of Plexiglass, which compressed and magnified the features of her body.

While both British artists came to prominence in their respective fields in the 1990s, their work at the time could not have been more disparate. Luchford was well-known for his sleek editorial photographs of glamorous supermodels that appeared in top fashion magazines and narrative, film-like campaigns for Prada and other high-fashion brands. On the other hand, ‘Young British Artist ’ (YBA) Saville became infamous for her monumental, richly colored, highly textured figurative paintings portraying nude women at unusual, distorted angles. Despite the polarity of their practices, in Closed Contact the pair found an artistic kinship that married elements of both their practices.

Luchford applied the highly cinematic qualities characteristic of his work, including dramatic lighting and deliberate cropping. Trading her bravura brushwork for photography, Saville continued her examination of the visceral qualities of the human form with the same scale, energy, and physicality inherent to her paintings.

As the subject of this work, Saville refuses an objective position by evoking the abject. By employing the ‘aesthetics of disgust,’ Luchford and Saville present the raw, unflinching truth of flesh, prompting viewers to interrogate deeply entrenched assumptions of beauty and the permeation of female objectification in Western culture (Michelle Meagher, ‘Jenny Saville and a Feminist Aesthetics of Disgust,’ A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, vol. 18, no. 4).

The Closed Contact series was exhibited in its entirety at Gagosian Beverly Hills, California, U.S.A., in 2002. Photographs from the series are held in institutional collections including the Aberdeen Art Gallery, Aberdeen, Scotland, United Kingdom and the Denver Art Museum, Denver, Colorado, U.S.A.

Signed and dated ‘Jenny Saville/Glen Luchford 1996’.

Numbered 10/10 + 3 AP, verso.

C-print mounted in acrylic glass box.

180 x 183 x 17.5 cm.

Provenance

Bukowskis, Stockholm, sale 658, Contemporary Art & Design, 22 - 23 October 2024, lot 205.

Firestorm Foundation (acquired at the above sale).

Copyright Firestorm Foundation