Over the centuries, many artists have made their name for an implausible ability to turn paint into flesh. But when British artist Jenny Saville shot to fame in the 1990s, it was clear that she was going to offer something new. “I paint women as most women see themselves,” she once explained. “I try to catch their identity, their skin, their hair, their heat, their leakiness.”
Despite Saville’s quick rise and enduring appeal, she has only just received her first major solo exhibition at a London museum. “Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting” at the National Portrait Gallery spans three decades of the artist’s varied practice across some 50 paintings and drawings. The exhibition, which will travel to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth in Texas this October, takes the viewer on a chronological journey from the artist’s beginnings as a YBA who made a splash with vast but surprisingly sensitive paintings to her recent production of luridly eye-catching heads that belong firmly in the digital era. Every stage of Saville’s practice as presented in this show is united by their commitment to offering a fresh lens on women’s bodily experiences and rethinking how the female form has been represented throughout Western art history.
Jenny Saville, Reverse (2002–03). © Jenny Saville. Courtesy of Gagosian.
Indeed, she has painted women of all dimensions and ages, including pregnant women and trans women. She has also proven to be unusually daring in her appetite for ongoing stylistic evolution, one that has had no trouble maintaining collector interest (she has been represented by mega-dealer Gagosian since 1997).
Reclaiming the Nude
In 2018, the $12.4 million sale of Propped at Sotheby’s London made Saville the highest-selling living female painter. (As of this past May, that title is now held by Marlene Dumas.) It is little surprise that the 1992 painting set a record when you consider its lore. The seven-foot-tall canvas debuted in Saville’s graduation show at the Glasgow School of Art, where it was positioned in front of a mirror so that viewers could read its reversed scrawled text. “If we continue to speak in this sameness—speak as men have spoken for centuries, we will fail each other,” it reads, which are words borrowed from French feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray. The work made enough of a splash to feature in an article about British art in the London , where it soon caught the eye of notorious art dealer Charles Saatchi. He acquired it and supported Saville while she worked on her first solo gallery show in 1994. In 2004, it was acquired by the late collector David Teiger.
Jenny Saville, Propped (1992). Image: © Jenny Saville. Courtesy of Gagosian.
The work, though lauded, also proved controversial for its unidealized and confrontational composition. Some have been surprised to discover that the nude perched on a stool is Saville herself, and that the unusual configuration results from her own perspective. To the viewer, the towering figure is unidealized yet raised precariously on a pedestal. “I wanted to create these mountains of flesh, so your eye traversed up and over the model’s body,” Saville said in the show’s catalogue.
Saville’s paintings still regularly command impressive prices. Just the other week, Saville’s 1994 painting Juncture sold for $7.3 million at Sotheby’s London while her drawing Mirror (2011–12) surpassed its $1.65 million high estimate to fetch $2.11 million, marking a record in the medium for the artist.
Jenny Saville, Ruben’s Flap (1998–99). © Jenny Saville. Courtesy of Gagosian.
Though well-known and appreciated by collectors, the artist’s unconventional approach to picturing the human form still invites some academic debate. The National Portrait Gallery’s current show has raised the question of whether or not Saville’s work counts as portraiture. Though real people feature in her work—most notably Saville herself and her children—she does not make portraits in the traditional sense as she is less concerned with subjectivity than with the experience of inhabiting a body. In a work like (1993–94), the canvas is filled with the pasty back of an anonymous figure, still imprinted with the recognizable markings of tight underwear.
Some of Saville’s works, like (1993), turn the body into a topography marked with the kind of contour lines that might be made by a plastic surgeon’s scalpel, or the mind of an obsessive dieter. Developing this idea, Saville herself sat in on plastic surgeries at a clinic in New York, an experience that resulted in the painting (1998–99), so named after one breast reconstruction technique. The composition seemingly merges together three big-breasted torsos, each topped with a different angle of Saville’s own head.
Though the body has been spliced up, the effect is to multiply its pleasingly real, imperfect appeal. The act has unavoidably feminist undertones, though Saville has insisted that the works have no particular agenda and are instead impartial observations about the ways in which women inhabit their bodies.
Renaissance Influences
Many of Saville’s greatest hits also bare the traces of painting forebears like Rubens—as the title of (1998–99) implies—as well as Rembrandt, Francis Bacon, and Lucian Freud. Yet, Saville’s gestural, diffusive application of paint also encroaches on abstraction, and she has named Willem de Kooning and Cy Twombly among her heroes.
Jenny Saville, One out of two (symposium) (2016). © Jenny Saville. Courtesy of Gagosian.
A significant chunk of Saville’s corpus is heavily influenced by the sketches of Italian Renaissance heroes like Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo. As a child, the artist would admire her parent’s copy of Leonardo’s The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and Saint John the Baptist (ca. 1500). “I liked how you couldn’t really tell whose leg belonged to whom, and how it became a kind of collective image,” she recently told the . She sought to bring a similarly layered dynamism to a new body of work that would capture the cascading effects of time and movement.
In works like One out of two (symposium) from 2016, the results are almost orgiastic and the composition is further energized by a frenzy of deep red scribbles. “I built the figures thinking about sculptural form,” Saville said in the show’s catalogue. “It’s an organic process, developing one figure after another until the mass of humans have a solidity. It’s one of my favorite ways of working, because you visually build something trying to embody a strong armature. Although this particular grouping of figures couldn’t exist in real life, it hopefully has a believable feeling of a sculptural, human mass.”
Jenny Saville, Aleppo (2017–18). © Jenny Saville. Courtesy of NGS.
Saville did not only use this technique to invent human masses but also to capture something true about her experiences of motherhood that had been sorely lacking from the history of art. While countless men have depicted infants as impossibly docile, Saville sought to record the chaotic, squirming reality in a series of drawings that stand out for their tangle of limbs.
Unusually, the title of refers to the Syrian civil war, setting it apart from Saville’s other depictions of early childhood. The painting’s central motif echoes Michelangelo’s a universal symbol of parental grief that foregrounds the devastating impact of such conflicts on civilians of all ages.
Stylistic Evolution
Her most recent work—glossy, mesmeric, and artificially-colored, in pastel pinks, purples and oranges—evokes our over-filtered existence in the digital age. It is a far cry from her monumental YBA-era blockbusters and, over three decades, her practice has taken many more unpredictable turns.
Jenny Saville, Chasah (2020). © Jenny Saville. Courtesy of Gagosian.
This new direction grew out of a trip to Moscow in 2019, when Saville began photographing local models. The subjects of these paintings are very conventionally attractive young women but, in some cases, their faces have been fractured, alluding to the conjuring of identity in the digital world. Saville has spoken often about her fascination with the way in which life navigated with a smart device in hand layers different realms over each other, requiring us to continuously shift between them.
“[I tried] to put everything [I] can into articulating what it feels like to live now,” Saville said about an exhibition of some of these works at Gagosian New York in 2020. “What is pictorial space in a time of panels of floating realities on a computer screen?”
In this example, the subject is named as Chasah, an Ecology student. Additionally, observant viewers will note a self-portrait of Saville’s silhouette hovering in the woman’s left eye. It might be read as an easter egg referring to the artist’s recurrent appearances in her own paintings since the early 1990s. Once again, however, Saville has emphasized that these latest works cannot be easily categorized as portraits of an individual.
“This new work evolved slowly, out of a whole lot of things,” she explained, citing also ancient sources like cave paintings and Egyptian art. “I’m trying to get to something that has a more universal feeling.”
Source: Exhibition - news.artnet.com
