Jenny Saville

Jenny Saville, a British painter, has gained recognition for her stylized nude portraiture, depicting bulky figures. Her uncompromising treatment of painterly bodies draws comparisons with the artworks of Lucian Freud and Peter Paul Rubens.

Biography of Jenny Saville

Jenny Saville was born in 1970 in Cambridge, England. She attended Lilley and Stone School in Newark, now called the Grove School Specialist Science College. Her college years were in Scotland, where she studied at the Glasgow School of Art from 1988 to 1992.

Following this, she received a six-month scholarship at the University of Cincinnati, where she encountered what she described as "lots of big women and big white bodies in shorts and T-shirts," a physicality that intrigued her since her early fascination with her piano teacher.

After completing her postgraduate education, British art collector Charles Saatchi offered Saville an 18-month contract, supporting her as she created new artworks to be exhibited at his gallery. These pieces became part of the Young British Artists III collection and were presented to the public in 1994. Saville's self-portrait titled "The Plan" was a highlight of this show. Following the success of "The Plan," she produced a series of new pieces that garnered even more attention from viewers.

Jenny Saville's Art Style

Jenny Saville is renowned for her large-scale paintings, often placing her nudes on expansive surfaces that emphasize the size of the depicted figures. Distorting the form was a significant consideration for her, as these deformities often carried the conceptual weight of the piece. She achieved these effects with high-caliber brushstrokes and patches of oil color, showcasing strong control over this challenging technique of forming a painterly composition. These images are richly pigmented, offering a highly sensual impression of the skin's surface — a quality often praised as one of Saville's most remarkable abilities.

While primarily focused on the female body, Saville also delved into subjects of transgender and indeterminate gender. The artist cites Pablo Picasso as a strong influence that directed her focus towards female figures, admiring Picasso's treatment of painterly subjects as solid presences.

At the heart of Jenny Saville's art is a fascination with the endless aesthetic and formal possibilities inherent in the materiality of the human body, with all its flaws and features. Her monumental oil paintings depict subjects with a sculptural yet elusive dimensionality, bordering on the abstract while exaggerated grotesquely. These figures are deformed, obese, brutalized, or mutilated, offering a stark contrast to the conventional idealized portraits of women often seen in art history. This morbidity is a recurring theme among the works of the Young British Artists and permeates all of Saville's non-portraiture pieces as well.

Even in her more mature works, this theme persists, with bodies embracing and intertwined in Saville's enduring figurative investigations that have evolved as she matured over the years.