Jenny Saville

Jenny Saville studied at the Slade School Of Fine Art between 1992 and 1994. 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 City.

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SAATCHI GALLERY EXHIBITION