Jennifer Anne Saville (born 7 May 1970) is an English figurative painter and an original member of the Young British Artists (YBAs).Royal Academy of Arts: Jenny Saville RA | Artist | Royal Academy of Arts , accessdate: 29 August 2014 Saville lives and works in Oxford, England, and is noted for her large-scale nudes of unconventional female subjects. Some credit her with originating a new method of painting the female nude for contemporary art.
Recurring figures depicted in her work range from mothers, children, transgender people, burn victims, and cosmetic surgery patients. Although her work subverts many beauty standards and is informed by contemporary feminist theory, she also often references art history in her paintings.
As of 2018, she is regarded as the "Most Expensive Living Female Artist" after her work Propped (1992) sold at Sotheby’s for £9.5 million (~US$11.7 million).
Early life and education Saville was born in Cambridge, England. For secondary school, she went to the Lilley and Stone School (now The Newark Academy) in Newark, Nottinghamshire.
From 1988 to 1992, Saville earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) degree at the Glasgow School of Art. While studying there, she was awarded a six-month scholarship to the University of Cincinnati in 1991, where she enrolled in a course in women's studies.
Career Saville's early works included large-scale self-portraits and other portraiture. Since her debut in 1992, Saville's focus has remained on the female body, stating she is "drawn to bodies that emanate a sort of state of in-betweenness: hermaphrodite, a transvestite, a carcass, a half-alive/half-dead head."
Charles Saatchi offered Saville an 18-month contract, supporting her while she created new works to be exhibited at the Saatchi Gallery in London.
In 1994, the exhibition Young British Artists III displayed Saville's self-portrait, Plan (1993), as the signature piece."SAVILLE, Jenny". Benezit Dictionary of Artists. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press. Web. 24 September 2015. <http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/benezit/B00300069>. Saville is regarded as being part of the Young British Artists (YBAs).
Also n 1994, Saville observed plastic surgery operations in New York City. Her published sketches and documents include surgical photographs of liposuction, trauma victims, deformity correction, disease, and transgender patients.Schama, Simon. "Jenny Saville". The Saatchi Gallery, 2005. Retrieved on 6 February 2008. Much of her work features distorted flesh, while others show the marks of plastic surgery.
Between 1995 and 1996, Saville collaborated with photographer Glen Luchford to produce Closed Contact, a series of large photographic C-prints which depict Saville's nude body pressed up against a clear panel. The photographs were taken from underneath the glass and depict the female figure very distorted. The series explores femininity and the challenges the perception of the female body. The works were shown in 2002 at the Gagosian Gallery in Beverley Hills.
In 2004, Saville 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 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."
In 2018, Saville's Propped (1992) sold at Sotheby's in London for £9.5 million, well above its £3-£4 million estimate, becoming the most expensive work by a living female artist sold at auction. Saville's work Propped (1992) was described as "one of the undisputed masterpieces of the Young British Artists" by Sotheby's European head of Contemporary Art, Alex Branczik. This piece is said to be masterful because it is "the superlative self-portrait that shatters canonised representations of female beauty."
In 2023, Saville was one of two women (alongside Julie Mehretu) to have made the top 10 auction lots sold in that year. Work Materials and technique Saville is known for her use of large canvases, usually or more. She usually paints these by placing them on the floor and using brushes and extended tools to apply and manipulate paint, pushing, smearing, and scraping the pigment across the canvases.
Saville's work is also known for her use of strongly pigmented oil paint applied in heavy layers. Kenny Smith of the Scottish Field commented that Saville's layering of colours and techniques "capture a sense of motion and fluidity. These restless images provide no fixed point, but rather suggest the perception of simultaneous realities."Kenny Smith (26 March 2018), Jenny Saville’s work is put in the frame in Scotland Scottish Field. Saville's technique creates a look that is visceral and fleshy, with the size of her paintings allowing the viewer to see the details and layering of her aesthetic of movement and abstract realism. Saville's "post-painterly style" has been compared to that of Lucian Freud and Rubens. Her work has also been compared to the gestural painting of Willem de Kooning in his Woman series.Saville often uses small brushstrokes to build up the paint and soften the image. Using this technique, the finish of her paintings are matte without appearing "dry".Robinson, Hilary, "Approaching Painting through Feminine Morphology", "Paragraph 25, no. 3", 2002 She frequently uses muted colour combinations for her work to create a soft atmosphere that contrasts with her usually intense subject matter. In an interview for the Saatchi Gallery, Saville commented that she tries to create a balance between abstract and aesthetic effect and realistic depiction of the body in her work.
Saville also sometimes cuts into the layered paint on the canvas. In Plan (1993), which explores themes of plastic surgery, for example, she says "I didn't draw onto the body. I wanted the idea of cutting into the paint. Like you would cut into the body. It evokes the idea of surgery. It has lots of connotations."
In Saville's later works, she has used graphite, charcoal, and pastel to render overlapping figures. These works are reminiscent of traditional underdrawings and illustrate themes of 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".
Subject matter The primary subject of Saville's works are the female nude and figuration, with the majority of all of Saville’s early works being the artist herself, and having almost exclusively painted female subjects since. Her works often "depict distorted, fleshy, and disquieting female bodies" to provoke the viewer. "I paint flesh because I'm human", she has said. "If you work in oil, as I do, it comes naturally. Flesh is just the most beautiful thing to paint."
Saville seeks to break down the social conventions that encourage women to fit into limiting beauty standards, having expressed issues regarding the prevalence of generally accepted standards of beauty: "A lot of women [are] 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".Hunter Davies (1 March 1994), "This is Jenny and this is her plan", Independent. In this vein she has also looked at plastic surgery in her work, for example, in Plan (1993), which shows the marks made on a body before having liposuction done.
Saville plays upon the "ambiguity of embodiment" and what it means to be "feminine" or "beautiful" through the use of the distortion and "disgust". Gallerist Asana Greenstreet commented that Saville performs "explorations of people that are both intimate and uncomfortable. Through detailed, frank and unapologetic investigations of the human body, dialogues occur between past and present, and are animated by questions of gender, suffering, and ambiguity."Asana Greenstreet (3 July 2012), "Jenny Saville at Modern Art Oxford", Aesthetica Magazine. This "aesthetic of disgust" frequently pushes viewers to view and confront conceptions of women in Western society, giving some the autonomy to decide their own standard of beauty beyond this. Michelle Meagher writes 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. Scholars like Loren Erdrich argue there is a direct link between the physical body, identity, and the self presented within Saville's subjects.Erdrich, Loren, "I Am a Monster: The Indefinite and the Malleable in Contemporary Female Self-Portraiture", Circa, no. 121, 2007, doi:10.2307/25564831. Suzie Mackenzie of The Guardian described Saville's work as frankly describing the disparity between the way women are perceived and the way that they feel about their bodies."Suzie Mackenzie (22 October 2005), "Under the skin", The Guardian.
After having children, Saville's subjects and methods opened up, though still revolve around the depiction of bodies. Her references expanded to include motherhood, art history, and ancient myth. Saville’s work has been read as directed against the fantasy that humans can be the complete authors of their lives.
Influences Saville partially credits her artistic interest in big bodies to the works of Pablo Picasso."Jenny Saville Biography ". Artbank.com. Retrieved on 5 February 2008.
From the beginning of her career, Saville has engaged in the exploration of the body and its historical representation. Saville borrows conventions from a long tradition in figure painting, including using poses borrowed from Madonna and Child paintings by Leonardo da Vinci, as well as techniques associated with other male masters to create portraiture from a female point of view, and referencing a wide range of other art historical sources including antique and Hindu sculpture, to Renaissance drawing and painting, to the work of modern artists such as Henri Matisse, Willem de Kooning, and Pablo Picasso. Her views on beauty expand the traditional nude form into a way to comment on the body, gender politics, sexuality, and self-realisation.
Saville has created exhibitions of work directly inspired by historical artists and artworks. In 2016, her solo exhibition Jenny Saville Drawing: A Contemporary Response to Drawing in Venice, at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, was the final section of the Titian to Canaletto: Drawing in Venice exhibition, where twenty new works on paper and canvas were produced in response to the Venetian drawings in the exhibition. In the same year, her show Erota at London's Gagosian Gallery showed drawings also inspired by this exhibition.
Awards Saville has been nominated and awarded several honours and prizes including:
1990: John and Mabel Craig Award, Glasgow School of Art 1991: Scholarship, University of Cincinnati 1992: British Institution Award, Royal Academy of Arts, London 1992: The James Cumming Award, Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh 1992: The Newbery Medal, Glasgow School of Art 1993: Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Award, Montreal, Canada 1995: Lord Provost’s Award for Contemporary Art, Glasgow, Scotland 1996: Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Award, Montreal, Canada 2000: US Art Critics Association: Best Commercial Gallery Show (Gagosian), New York 2007: Elected a Royal Academician, Royal Academy of Arts, London
Exhibitions
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