Jenny Saville: The Complete Story
A nude body fills the entire canvas, vast and close, every fold and mark of the flesh laid bare in thick, churning paint. Jenny Saville paints the human body at monumental scale and with unflinching honesty, and has become one of the most important painters of her generation.
She is a British artist, linked to the Young British Artists, famous for huge, fleshy paintings of the nude body that confront beauty, weight and the body itself.
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The body up close
Saville paints bodies far larger than life, pressed right up against the picture plane so the viewer cannot look away from the flesh.
Her work reinvents the nude in art, rejecting the smooth ideal for real, heavy, marked bodies painted with enormous force.
Paint like flesh
She handles oil paint thickly and physically, smearing, scraping and building it so the surface itself seems to become skin and muscle.
The result is portrait painting of the whole body, where the paint carries the weight and warmth of a living person.
The Young British Artists
Saville came to fame in the 1990s as part of the group known as the Young British Artists, championed by the collector Charles Saatchi.
While many of that group worked in shock and spectacle, she stayed with paint, insisting that the old medium still had new things to say.
The record breaker
In 2018 one of her paintings, Propped, sold at auction for around twelve and a half million dollars, setting a record for the most expensive work by a living woman artist at the time.
The sale confirmed that her serious, demanding paintings had reached the very top of the art world.
Questions readers ask about Jenny Saville
What is she known for?
Huge, fleshy paintings of the nude body.
What group is she linked to?
The Young British Artists of the 1990s.
What record did she set?
The highest auction price for a living woman artist, in 2018.
Where is she from?
Britain, born in 1970.
Why her bodies command attention
Saville insisted that painting, the oldest medium, could still shock and move in an age of video and installation, and she was right.
Her vast, honest bodies refuse every comfortable ideal, which is why a single canvas of hers can now outsell the work of any other living woman.
She studied the work of the old masters closely, from Rubens to the wartime painter who recorded the body in distress, and that deep knowledge gives her radical canvases their grounding.
Major museums have given her full retrospectives, and a recent show set her vast bodies directly alongside the Renaissance masters she learned from, a measure of how seriously she is now taken.
Each painting can take a long time to build, layer over layer, which keeps her output small and the demand fierce. She has spoken about wanting to paint the body as it really is, scarred, heavy, alive, rather than as an ideal, and that honesty has made her a central figure for a generation rethinking how flesh is shown in art, with her work now held by the world leading museums.
Major museums have given her full retrospectives, and a recent show hung her vast bodies directly beside the Renaissance masters she studied, a measure of how seriously the art world now takes her.
Her example has encouraged a wider return to ambitious figure painting, proof that the oldest subject in art still has room for something genuinely new.