Jenny Saville

Jenny Saville is a contemporary British figure painter born in 1970.

Jenny Saville paints figurative paintings of large, fleshy, obese women with a tremendous physicality about them. Saville is not a painter of conventional beauty, although her painting approach is beautiful, lush tones and thick fleshy forms, she chooses a confrontational subject choice (rather than simply observational) for her paintings. Saville is most often compared to contemporary British painter Lucian Freud and Peter Paul Rubens (work seen in previous posts) in her portrayal of flesh as art.
Huge figures, painted large in scale confront our notions of beauty in an age saturated by notions of skinniness and runway models, femininity and idealized images of the female figure.

Saville traveled to NY in the mid 1990’s spending hours in the workplace of Dr. Barry Martin Weintraub, a plastic surgeon based in the city. There she took photographs of patients receiving cosmetic surgeries and liposuctions, gaining an understanding of the anatomy of the human body and the manipulations possible by surgery. This physical understanding led to a psychological awareness of the factors behind the alterations present in patients, and the market for medical beautification.
Saville is interested in gender in art. Her artworks are exclusively of women, transsexuals and transgender people often in confronting, violent positions. There is also a certain
tenderness present in some works, a hidden look of vulnerability as seen in an image like

Saville fulfills what it means to be a figure painter in the twenty first century. With a certain amount of abstraction and realism, her works are both modern and traditional. She pushes paint around in passages of intensity and areas of quiet, moving the eye around the flesh. She often adds several figures in one picture, twisting, stretching in different
angles.


Saville describes her painting approach in her work passage… “I was looking for a kind of contemporary architecture of the body. I wanted to paint a visual passage through gender – a sort of gender landscape. To scale from the penis, across a stomach to the breasts, and finally the head. I tried to make the lips and eyes be very seductive and use directional mark-making to move your eye around the flesh.”
Saville describes the scale of her paintings
“I like that sense of awe. I'm small, so to make something huge just fills me up. I love that ability to make something, to make marks across the surface and have the physicality of it take over my body. I like art that's not really intellectual, something that has to do with sensation.”

Passage 2004 336 x 290 cm
, Saville writes that she “was interested in the malls, where you saw lots of big women. Big white flesh in shorts and T-shirts. It was good to see because they had the physicality that I was interested in.”
Born in 1970, she came of age in the 1980s: "Everyone was obsessed with the body - it was all about dieting, gym, the body beautiful. Pornography, Aids were the big debates." She was influenced by feminism. "As a child I'd look through art books and there were no women artists. Of course, you start to ask why not." And: "Could I make a painting of a nude in my own voice? It's such a male-laden art, so historically weighted. The way women were depicted didn't feel like mine, too cute. I wasn't interested in admired or idealised beauty."

As one writer points out “Her exaggerated nudes point up, with an agonizing frankness, the disparity between the way women are perceived and the way that they feel about their bodies”. Saville uses the scale of her canvases to achieve the scope of her ideas. Her ginormous figures tumble across the canvas and into the viewer's physical space, hyper large and hyper real with an intense physicality.
“I have moved from the anatomy of the body to the anatomy of paint," she says. "That is how I see it. Spaces within the body of the paint are what interest me now."

Her images offer a queasy experience of fragmented bodies, uncomfortable and uneasy, her paint becoming flesh and her images sparking doubts about our own bodies.

What relevance does jenny Saville’s work have to the 21st century? Her painting technique is rooted in strong traditional tonal realism with servings of abstraction in areas of the figure. Her subject matter doesn’t shy away from confrontation, from shocking the viewer by its inherent size and scale, flesh painted with gusto. Saville’s rightful fame is rooted not just in her talent with a brush, but the relevance of the body in our current culture. A culture that obsesses with the body image and beauty, Saville work is a reflection on the neurotic nagging voice of doubt and unease within our bodies and minds.