Jenny Saville

(England, 05/07/1970 - )

Reverse (2002-03)

Best known for her female portraits, Saville explores gender, sexuality and violence through transgressive depictions of the feminine, non-binary and transgender body that challenge art history’s tradition of idealised beauty and female nudes. Instead, her subjects are outlandish and grotesque as well as psychologically confronting.

After graduating from Glasgow School of Art in 1992, Saville was awarded a six-month scholarship to the University of Cincinnati where she found inspiration in corpulent women and the plastic surgery culture. Combined with the influences of Old Masters including Titian and Velazquez, this ignited Saville’s fascination with the simultaneous resilience and fragility of human flesh as well as the boundaries between beauty and mutilated forms. Such a juxtaposition was magnified in a 2021 exhibition curated by the Museo degli Innocenti in Florence, where 100 of Saville’s paintings and drawings were displayed alongside works by Renaissance masters across five major Florentine galleries and museums.

Throughout her career, Saville has reinvigorated contemporary figurative painting by challenging the limits of the genre while raising questions about society’s perception of the female body and how it has been represented over time and across cultures. The imperfections of flesh, its social implications and taboos are at the centre of Saville’s monumental canvases that are at once figurative and abstract, beautiful and grotesque.

In 2018, Saville’s painting Propped (1992) sold at auction for $12.4 million, making it the highest price paid for a work by a living woman artist. This, however, is dwarfed by the record for the highest price paid for a work by a living male artist, held by Jeff Koons for the $91.1 million sale of Rabbit (1986) in 2019, showing that art made by women is still vastly undervalued and underappreciated.

Image: Jenny Saville, Reverse (2002-03). Oil on canvas, 213.4 x 243.8 cm. Gagosian Gallery, U.K.