Jenny Saville facts for kids

Jennifer Anne Saville RA (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. Saville has been credited with 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 underwent 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."

Early life and education

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.

Career

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. 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.

Since her debut in 1992, Saville's focus has remained on the female body. 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 color, 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. Saville's post-painterly style has been compared to that of Lucian Freud and Rubens.

Album covers

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

Recent work

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".

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

Representations of the body is an important aspect of Jenny Saville's work, which brought her international acclaim. She attributes most of her style and subjects to this theme of representations. Savilles' work Propped (1992), which is the most expensive work sold at an auction house by a living female artist, has been described as "one of the undisputed masterpieces of the Young British Artists" by Sothebys' European head of Contemporary Art, Alex Branczik. This piece is said to be so masterful because it is "the superlative self-portrait that shatters canonized representations of female beauty."

In an interview for the Saatchi Gallery, Saville comments "I have to really work at the tension between getting the paint to have the sensory quality that I want and be constructive in terms of building the form of a stomach, for example, or creating the inner crevice of a thigh. The more I do it, the more the space between abstraction and figuration becomes interesting. I want a painting realism. I try to consider the pace of a painting, of active and quiet areas. Listening to music helps a lot, especially music where there's a hard sound and then soft breathable passages."

Saville's art focuses on women's bodies as the predominant subject matter, and is a far cry away from other works of the female form. She is more interested in the raw and unaltered female form. Her body of work therefore challenges traditional representations of women and also the modern-day filtered and perfect body image, encouraged by social media. Saville does this by focusing on the bumps, dimples, rolls and contours of women's bodies and flesh, representing some insecurities and imperfections, that have been excluded in depictions of women traditionally.

Saville's work was included in the 2022 exhibition Women Painting Women at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.

Technique and color choices

Saville's technique uses small brushstrokes to build up the painting and soften the imaging. The finish of the painting is matte, but it does not look "dry". She also uses interesting, muted color combinations for her art pieces that create a soft atmosphere free of harshness with an intense subject and meaning behind it. Saville works with oil paint, applied in heavy layers, becomes as visceral as flesh itself, each painted mark maintaining a supple, mobile life of its own. As Saville pushes, smears, and scrapes the pigment over her large-scale canvases. Saville is also known for her use of massive canvases that allow the viewer to see the details and layering of oil paints to create her signature aesthetic of movement and abstract realism.

Select works

• Branded (1992). Oil painting on a 7 ft × 6 ft (2.1 m × 1.8 m) canvas. In this painting, Saville painted her own face onto an obese female body. The figure in the painting is holding folds of her skin which she is seemingly showing off.
• Plan (1993). Oil painting on a 9 ft × 7 ft (2.7 m × 2.1 m) canvas.
• Closed Contact (1995–1996).
• Hybrid (1997). Oil painting on a 7 ft × 6 ft (2.1 m × 1.8 m) canvas. In this painting, the image looks much like patchwork. Different components of four female bodies are incorporated together to create a unique piece.
• Fulcrum (1999). Oil painting on an 8+1⁄2 ft × 16 ft (2.6 m × 4.9 m) canvas. In this painting, three obese women are piled on a medical trolley. Thin vertical strips of tape have been painted over and then pulled off the canvas, thus creating a sense of geometric measure at odds with the mountainous flesh.
• Hem (1999). Oil painting on a 10 ft × 7 ft (3.0 m × 2.1 m) canvas.
• Ruben's Flap (1998–1999). Oil painting on a 10 ft × 8 ft (3.0 m × 2.4 m) canvas. This painting depicts Saville herself; she multiplies her body, letting it fill the canvas space as it does in other works, but what is interesting is the fragmentation.
• Matrix (1999). Oil painting on a 7 ft × 10 ft (2.1 m × 3.0 m) canvas.

The Saatchi Gallery opened in 1985

Exhibitions

• 1992 – Cooling Gallery, London, UK (when Saatchi bought her one work on show)
• 1994 – "Young British Artists III", Saatchi Gallery, London, UK
• 1996 – "Contemporary British Art '96", Museum of Kalmar, Stockholm, Sweden
• 1996 – "A Collaboration", in collaboration with Glen Luchford, Pace/McGill Gallery, New York, US
• 1997 – 'Sensation', Royal Academy of Art, London, UK (brought Saville's work to the attention of the British public at large)
• 1999 – "Territories", Gagosian Gallery, New York (SoHo), US (first major solo exhibit)
• 2002 – "Closed Contact", in collaboration with Glen Luchford, Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills, California, US
• 2003 – "Migrants", Gagosian Gallery, New York (Chelsea), US
• 2004 – Large Scale Polaroids by Jenny Saville and Glen Luchford, University of Massachusetts Amherst, East Gallery
• 2005 – Solo Exhibition, Museo d'Arte Contemporanea Roma, Rome
• 2006 – inaugural exhibition, Museo Carlo Billoti, Rome, Italy
• 2010 – Gagosian Gallery, London, UK
• 2011 – "Continuum", Gagosian Gallery, New York City, US
• 2012 – "Jenny Saville, Solo Show", Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, Florida, US. (Part of the Norton's RAW series – Recognition of Art by Women)
• 2012 – Jenny Saville's first UK solo exhibition was held at Modern Art Oxford.+
• 2014 – "Egon Schiele - Jenny Saville", Kunsthaus Zürich, Zürich, CH
• 2016 – 'Jenny Saville Drawing', Ashmolean Museum, Venice, Italy. (Formed the final section of the 'Titian to Canaletto: Drawing in Venice' exhibition). Twenty new works on paper and canvas were produced in response to the Venetian drawings in the exhibition.
• 2016 – "Erota", Gagosian Gallery, London, UK. This exhibition held recent drawings inspired by the previous "Titian to Canaletto: Drawing in Venice" exhibition.
• "Ancestors", 3 May – 23 July 2018 at Gagosian Gallery, 522 West 21st Street, New York
• 2018 – "Now", Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Scotland, UK (during the Edinburgh Art Festival)
• 2018 – "Jenny Saville", The George Economou Collection, Athens, Greece

Other activities

• Gagosian Gallery, Member of the Board of Directors (since 2022)

See also

In Spanish: Jenny Saville para niños