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Torso - 2004-05, oil on canvas

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 and she is known for her large-scale painted depictions of nude women. Saville has been credited with originating a new and challenging method of painting the female nude and reinventing figure painting for contemporary art. Some paintings are small one foot by one foot paintings while other are large nine feet by seven feet paintings. Saville's paintings are stimulating but also employ anxiety. Monumental subjects come from pathology textbooks that she has studied all kinds 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 under went cosmetic surgery to reshape a portion of their body. In do that, she carputers "marks of personality for the flesh" and together embrace how we can be the writers of our own lives.

Career

At the end of Saville's undergraduate education, the leading British art collector, Charles Saatchi, purchased her degree exhibition. 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. She has stated, "I'm drawn to bodies that emanate a sort of state of in-betweenness: hermaphrodite, a transvestite, a carcass, a half-alive/half-dead head." 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 and give a highly sensual impression of the surface of the skin as well as the mass of the body. 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", and commented: You can have lovely shiny buttocks and guns everywhere in the supermarket on covers of magazines and CDs, but you show a piece of art and people just freak out. 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. 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".

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.

Selected Work

• 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 size of the breasts and midsection is very exaggerated. 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. This painting depicts a nude female figure with contour lines marked on her body, much like that of a topographical map. Saville said of this work: "The lines on her body are the marks they make before you have liposuction done to you. They draw these things that look like targets. I like this idea of mapping of the body, not necessarily areas to be cut away, but like geographical contours on a map. I didn't draw on to the body. I wanted the idea of cutting into the paint. Like you would cut into the body. It evokes the idea of surgery. It has lots of connotations."
• Closed Contact (1995–1996). She collaborated with artist Glen Luchford to create a series of C-prints depicting a larger female nude lying on plexiglass. The photographs were taken from underneath the glass and depict the female figure very distorted.
• 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. This painting depicts a very large nude female with lots of subtle textures implied. The bits of orange showing through the stomach add a glow, while the figure's left side is covered with thick white paint as if by a plaster cast, and her pubic area, painted pink over dark brown, resembles carved painted wood.
• 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. Decisive lines divide the body into square planes, and it appears that she is trying to hide the nakedness with the different planes. Saville seems to be struggling to convince herself that the parts of her body are beautiful.
• Matrix (1999). Oil painting on a 7 ft × 10 ft (2.1 m × 3.0 m) canvas. In this painting, Saville depicts a reclining nude figure with female breasts and genitalia, but with a masculine, bearded face. The genitalia is thrust to the foreground, making it much more of a focus in the picture than the gaze. The arms and legs of the figure are only partly seen, the extremities lying outside the boundary of the picture. The whole is painted in fairly naturalistic fleshy tones.

References

1. Saville, Jenny. (2005) Jenny Saville New York: Rizzoli. ISBN-13: 978-0-8478-2757-2

• This is a book published by Rizzoli International in New York, so it should be a reliable source. It covers interviews, her artwork, acknowledgments from other artists, and more.

2. Grant, C. (2000). Saville, Jenny. Grove Art Online. Retrieved March 2, 2022, from https://www.oxfordartonline.com/groveart/view/10.1093/gao/9781884446054.001.0001/oao-9781884446054-e-7000096964?rskey=3Jvv1D

• This article introduces Saville and the beginning process of her paintings.