Artist Jenny Saville on the body as landscape
Colossal heads, with luminous faces – intense and inscrutable – line the walls of Jenny Saville's studio in Oxford, England. She described the portrait's inner glow: "I'll just rub the paint in and make it have a sort of inner light that's left here. It's a special thing that only paint can do actually."
And what is it that she hopes to convey? "To distil a sort of essence of what we are as human beings," she replied. "I mean, I think that if you paint figuratively, that's what it's about really. It's some sort of communication of the unspoken."
Saville's breakthrough came in the early 1990s, with her audacious self-portrait "Propped," which would later sell for more than $12 million at auction. It had initially caught the eye of collector Charles Saatchi, who saw it at her art school degree show, and commissioned more.
"It's incredible opportunity for a 21-year-old," Saville said. "He just said, 'Make whatever you like.' And I stood in the space, I saw the back wall and thought, I'm gonna make a triptych. And I just got to work, really."
Like "Propped," that triptych, titled "Strategy (South Face/Front Face/North Face)," was a bold rendering of a woman's body.
Asked where her fascination with flesh began, Saville said, "There's not a sort of start point. Freud, Bacon, Auerbach, Picasso, Degas, they were all artists that I liked. Egon Schiele, De Kooning – people that painted the body. Old master painters like Titian, Velasquez. They were painters that I just was drawn to looking at. You just develop along a certain way and build your language."
Saville's own gaze was both curious and clinical. From her first solo show, the painting "Planned" depicts a torso marked up for liposuction. "If you have a cosmetic surgery book or a plastic surgery book, it will show you how flesh is moved around the body in order to keep it alive for reconstruction of a breast, for example," she said. "And I found that fascinating to extend my knowledge really of the body."
But she says she doesn't see treating the body as a landscape as a way to objectify the body: "I didn't see it as objectifying. I just saw it as the relationship with nature."
A recent retrospective at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth exhibited more than three decades of Saville's work, with a real focus on those arresting heads, most of them female. She said, "It was never a sort of conscious decision: 'Okay, I'm only gonna paint women.' I just did. And that became a language. I did a lot of self-portraits."
That language tackled the universal experience of motherhood, too. "The kind of wriggling, the sense of growth – it's a particular period in a woman's life that's just absolutely amazing and poignant and full of abundance," she said of her 2011 painting "The Mothers." "I wanted to communicate that."
Saville's latest exhibition, which opened in Venice this weekend, features her newest work. At 55, she is a giant in the modern art world, with the kind of success few living artists achieve.
Asked if she finds it gratifying that her paintings can sell in the millions, she replied, "I find a studio is the purest space for me, and I leave all of that at the door. So, when I come in here, I just don't think like that. You know, this painting isn't gonna get better because it's gonna be worth more money."
Asked if she would spend millions of pounds to buy a painting, Saville laughed: "I've never thought about that! Of course it's absurd. A painting can be the price of a house that a family can live in, and when you look at it like that you think, this is absurd. And on the other flip side of that, if you look through the history of art, art tended to get very good in moments where there have been financial support of artists and art, whether that's the Renaissance, through the papacy or commissions. And we are living through one of those times where we value art financially and culturally. Whether you can take those two things apart, I just don't know."
But she says she definitely feels lucky. "Oh my gosh. Absolutely!" she said. "You know, I've lived my life doing the activity that I loved when I was a kid. It's really who I am. I think you can ask any painter or sculptor or filmmaker or anybody creative, a dancer, a musician, it's a good way to live."
For more info:
- Jenny Saville (Instagram)
- Gagosian: Jenny Saville
- Jenny Saville a Ca' Pesaro, at the Ca' Pesaro International Gallery of Modern Art, Venice, Italy (through Nov. 22)
- Exhibition Catalogue: "Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting," by Jenny Saville (Rizzoli Electa), in Hardcover, available via Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Bookshop.org
- Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting, at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (Exhibition closed)
Images:
- © Jenny Saville. DACS 2026; Courtesy: Gagosian
- © Jenny Saville. DACS 2026; Photo: Irene Fanizza. Courtesy: Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia
- © Jenny Saville. Courtesy: Gagosian. Photo: David Parry
Story produced by Mikaela Bufano. Editor: Brian Robbins.
