Jenny Saville
Jenny Saville is a British contemporary painter born 1970 in Cambridge. She studied at The Glasgow School of Art, where she focused on figure painting and spent a semester abroad at Cincinnati University in 1989. She has been showing all over in big name places but to name a few, she has work in the collections of Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Broad, Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego and her work was included in the 50th Biennale di Venezia in 2003.
She exhibited her first “oversized woman” in 1990 and from there her career sky rocketed. The way she paints the figure is very sculptural because of the way he layers paint on top of each other in order to build the form.
Her canvases can be as larger as 16 feet in width. Her figures can fill the whole canvas and sometime even be cut off by the limiting frame. While their size and shape dominate the space, it is the foreshortening that creates an overwhelming submersion of bodily flesh.
Her natural talent comes through all of her work but especially her charcoal drawings. Sometimes also large in scale, she overlays a moving figure on top of itself for “visual layers of reality” to inform her paintings. In a Study of Diego Velazquez’s The Infanta Maria Threresa of Spain, Saville layers Picasso and De Kooning figures on top to create an image with “Anxious tangles of lines”.
She was always very interested in the figure since it was a “rich territory for artists”. But by the end of the 20th century, Saville points out that the figure was more related to vulnerability and considered private. Savile draws inspiration from all historical figure paintings, The Origin of the World, Courbet, Olympia by Manet, Freud, Picasso and Rembrandt, to name only a few.
Saville draws a lot of her imagery and inspiration from photographs of homicides, scientific operations, medical photographs and meat. She even goes as far as to watch scientific surgeries and face lifts to really understand the body and what is underneath the flesh.
In Cincinnati, she learned more about her interest with feminist studies, influenced most heavily by the 1970’s feminist movement. She doesn’t think of her work as portraiture because of the many photography and source references she relies on but the women she paints are real women who are “not dependent upon a male’s approval. This resistance against the male gaze stems from an acknowledgment that art and the art world is historically (and still currently) a male dominated field. Written on the painting Propped, is text by Belgian philosopher and feminist theorist Luce Irigary: “If we continue to speak in this sameness-- speak as men have spoken for centuries, we will fail each other. Again words will pass through our bodies, above our heads, disappear, make us disappear”
Since a young age of 23, Saville was an artist to watch. William Packer in 1994 wrote an amazing review of Saville saying that she was “a painter of considerable natural ability” and that “she deserves better than to be celebrated only for her imagery.” She was making work that had a basic feminist impact that was not made to satisfy men. This became more apparent from the large amount of criticism she received.
Most of the critics were male writers and most couldn’t see past boldness of large women imagery. Reviews from the show Young British Artists III, referred to her women as “blubbernaut(s)”, “three (dis-)graces”,“female fat-mountains” with “thigh like redwood trunks” and a “Himalayan expanse of quivering white female flesh”. She continues to battle a oppressive hierarchy of men.
Her imagery was meant to be shock the body. She describes her work as the “in-betweenness”. With life and death, her figures can hold a impersonal glazed trances which makes an uncomfortable situation of the in-betweenness. Her work also embodies anxieties about gender in-betweenness. Her figures are majority female but she work from many transexuals models. One author writes that her work is more closely related to feminist performance art than to traditional painter Freud, who she loves and is compared to.
