Jenny Saville is a British painter, born in Cambridge in 1970, who paints the human body at monumental scale. She was still a student at the Glasgow School of Art when Charles Saatchi bought her work in 1992, and in 2018 her student self-portrait Propped sold at Sotheby's in London for £9.5 million, the highest price a living woman artist had ever fetched at auction.
People who type her name are usually looking for one picture: a nude self-portrait taller than a man, painted while she was still a student. Most of her story is how that picture came to exist, and what it set off.
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Propped dates from 1992 and shows Saville herself, seated and naked, on a canvas more than two meters tall. Nobody who stands in front of it is as big as the woman in it. She painted it while she was still at the Glasgow School of Art.
Across the surface runs a passage of text in mirror writing, so that it can only be read in a mirror. The words are by Luce Irigaray, a French feminist philosopher. A student had put a feminist argument across her own naked body, and made the viewer work to read it.
Charles Saatchi, the advertising tycoon and collector, bought the painting. He bought much of what else she had made as a student, and offered her a contract to keep painting for his gallery. In October 2018 Propped came up for sale again in London, and the bidding passed every estimate.
What You'll Discover
Who bought her degree show.
What is written across Propped.
What she went to watch in New York.
Where Sensation took her work.
What a supermarket refused to shelve.