Jenny Saville

Jennifer Anne Saville, born 7 May 1970 in Cambridge, England, is a figurative painter and an original member of the Young British Artists. Based in Oxford, she is best known for her large-scale nudes of unconventional female subjects, and some consider her work a new approach to painting the female nude in contemporary art. In 2018, her painting *Propped* (1992) sold at Sotheby’s for £9.5 million, making her the most expensive living female artist at auction.

Saville attended the Lilley and Stone School in Newark, Nottinghamshire, then earned a BFA from the Glasgow School of Art between 1988 and 1992. During a six-month scholarship at the University of Cincinnati, she took a women’s studies course. She partly credits Pablo Picasso’s work for sparking her interest in large bodies.

Her early series featured large-scale self-portraits and other models. Charles Saatchi offered her an 18-month contract to create works for a 1994 exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery, where her self-portrait *Plan* (1993) was the signature piece. She has remained focused on the female body, saying she is drawn to bodies that suggest “a sort of state of in-betweenness: hermaphrodite, a transvestite, a carcass, a half-alive/half-dead head.” In 1994, she observed plastic surgery operations in New York, and her published sketches include surgical photographs of liposuction, trauma victims, deformity correction, disease, and transgender patients. Much of her work features distorted flesh or marks from cosmetic surgery. From 1996 to 2002, she collaborated with photographer Glen Luchford on *Closed Contact*, a series of large photographic prints showing her nude body pressed against a clear panel, exploring femininity and perceptions of the female body.

Her paintings have appeared on two album covers. *Strategy* (1994) was used for Manic Street Preachers’ *The Holy Bible* (1994), and *Stare* (2005) for their 2009 album *Journal for Plague Lovers*. UK supermarkets sold the latter CD in a plain slipcase after the cover was deemed “inappropriate.” The band’s James Dean Bradfield called the decision “utterly bizarre,” noting that “shiny buttocks and guns” are common on magazine covers, but art provokes a freak-out. The cover placed second in a 2009 poll for Best Art Vinyl.

In recent works, Saville uses graphite, charcoal, and pastel to render overlapping figures, reminiscent of traditional underdrawings and exploring movement, hybridity, and gender ambiguity. She says, “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.”

Saville works on massive canvases, often six feet square or larger, applying heavily pigmented oil paint in thick layers. She places canvases on the floor, using brushes and extended tools to push, smear, and scrape the pigment, building up paint with small brushstrokes to soften the image and achieve a matte finish that doesn’t look dry. Her post-painterly style has been compared to Lucian Freud and Rubens. She often uses muted color combinations to create a soft atmosphere contrasting with intense subject matter. Kenny Smith of *Scottish Field* notes that her layering of colors and techniques “capture a sense of motion and fluidity,” with restless images suggesting “simultaneous realities.” The size of her paintings lets viewers see details and layering of movement and abstract realism.

From the start, Saville has explored the body and its historical representation, borrowing conventions from figure painting—poses from Leonardo da Vinci’s Madonna and Child, color palettes from Rubens, or gestural painting from Willem de Kooning’s *Woman* series. She appropriates these male masters’ techniques to create portraiture from a female point of view. Her primary subject is the female nude and figuration.