Jenny Saville

Jennifer Anne Saville (born 7 May 1970) is a contemporary British painter and an original member of the Young British Artists.

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 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 under went 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."

She is one of two women to have made the top 10 auction lots sold in 2023.

Saville was born in Cambridge, England.

Saville went to the Lilley and Stone School (now The Newark Academy) in Newark, Nottinghamshire, for her secondary education, later gaining 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, 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.

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."

The collection, Young British Artists III, exhibited in 1994 with Saville's self-portrait, Plan (1993), as the signature piece.

Rising quickly to critical and public recognition and emerging as part of the Young British Artists (YBA) scene, Saville has been noted for creating art through the use of a classical standard—figure painting, but with a contemporary approach.

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 Lucian Freud and Rubens.

In 1994, Saville's painting Strategy (South Face/Front Face/North Face) appeared on the cover of Manic Street Preachers' third album The Holy Bible.

In 2002, she collaborated with photographer Glen Luchford 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 Saville's more recent work, she employs 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".

Saville's painting Stare (2005) was used for the cover of the band's 2009 album Journal for Plague Lovers.

The top four UK supermarkets stocked the CD in a plain slipcase, after the cover was deemed "inappropriate".

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".

The album cover art placed second in a 2009 poll for Best Art Vinyl.

Later, in 2018 Saville's Propped (1992) sold at Sothebys' 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.

Representations of the body is an important aspect of Jenny Saville's work.

Saville's stylized nude portraits of voluminous female bodies have brought her international acclaim.