Jenny Saville - Life and Career

Life and Career

Saville works and lives in Oxford, England. Saville went to the Lilley and Stone School (now The Grove Specialist Science College), Newark Notts for her secondary education, later gaining her degree at Glasgow School of Art (1988–1992), and was then awarded a six-month scholarship to the University of Cincinnati, where she states that she 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". A physicality that she partially credits to Pablo Picasso, an artist that she sees as a painter that made subjects as if "they were solidly there....not fleeting".

She studied at the Slade School Of Fine Art between 1992 and 1993. At the end of her postgraduate education, the leading British art collector, Charles Saatchi, purchased her entire senior show. He offered the artist an 18-month contract, supporting her while she created new works to be exhibited in the Saatchi Gallery in London. Rising quickly to great critical and public recognition in part through Saatchi’s patronage, Saville has been lauded for creating conceptual art through the use of a classical standard—figure painting. Although Saville’s chosen method is quite traditional and seemingly outmoded, she has found a way to reinvent figure painting and regain its prominent position in the context of art history. Known primarily for her large-scale paintings of nude women, Saville has also emerged as a major contemporary artist and leading figure of the Young British Artists (YBA). Her blatantly feminist subject matter, of obese and sometimes faceless women with vast bodies, partly originates from a trip to America. It was while studying at Cincinnati University in Ohio that Saville’s lifelong fascination with the workings of the human body began to affect her artwork. 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. In 1994, Saville spent many hours observing plastic surgery operations in New York.

Saville has dedicated her career to traditional figurative oil painting. Her painterly style has been compared to that of Lucian Freud and Rubens. Her paintings are usually much larger than life size. They are strongly pigmented and give a highly sensual impression of the surface of the skin as well as the mass of the body. She sometimes adds marks onto the body, such as white "target" rings.

Since her debut in 1992, Saville's focus has remained on the female body, slightly deviating into subjects with "floating or indeterminant gender," painting large scale paintings of transgender people. Her published sketches and documents include surgical photographs of liposuction, trauma victims, deformity correction, disease states and transgender patients.