Jenny Saville is best known for her large scale oil paintings of female bodies where she uses images of obese woman, transsexuals and transvestites. Saville has been known to occasionally model for her own work and she chooses bodies in which she believes represent the contemporary era. She is recognized for her oil paintings, which is unusual amongst today’s British artists and she has been compared to the style of Lucian Freud. I personally agree with this statement, as both use a wide range of colours and both artists accentuate people’s bodies and features. Saville has stated in an interview, that she grew up studying Freud, Piccasso, Bacon and Auerbach. Her paintings have made her become very well recognized amongst artists. At the impressive age of twenty-two during her first show, the famous British art collector Charles Saatchi bought her entire show and commissioned work for another two years, which for a young artist is very uncommon. Saville’s work has also been exhibited world wide in locations such as Sweden and New York, where she lived for a period of time in 1994.
In New York, Jenny studied plastic surgeon, Dr. Barry Weintraub where she watched the surgeries and took photographs. As odd as it sounds observing cosmetic surgeries and liposuctions whilst taking pictures, Saville claimed she gained ‘a better understanding of the human body and the various manipulations that can be made through modern medicine’. In an interview with Simon Schama Saville put ‘the influence of watching surgeons at work helped enormously with that. To see a surgeon’s hand inside a body moving flesh around, you see a lot of damage and adjustment to the boundary of the body. It helped me think as paint as matter.’ I think this image below is an example of how she gained an insight after studying plastic surgeries. The picture below is actually a photograph, which Saville displayed in the Gagosian gallery. The image is a C-print mounted in Plexiglas, and I feel the pictures are similar to a surgery in which the way the hands are deforming the look of the stomach. It was said that she wanted to express the pain and violence that she experienced whilst watching the operations. On the image below on the right, I feel that it expresses the pain that she felt as the model stretches her face and although the eyes are closed and you can not see the expression, you get a real feeling of sadness and understand they are in pain. The way Saville has managed to portray the emotion in the image is very skilful and I feel the photographs are some of my favourite from her collection.
This picture below is an example of her using a large colour swatch on her paintings. The way she doesn’t blend in the colours creates an intriguing look, which can also display quite an eerie appearance. I think it’s peculiar how she includes colours in the painting that perhaps weren’t in the original photograph but find it is a unique style of hers that has made her appreciated globally.
It has been said that a lot of people find her work too controversial and disturbing. Linda Nochlin writes about her work being: ‘the most interesting and exciting painter of our times. I do not say this lightly. The works are not just exciting but disturbing and hugely upsetting’. I personally feel that, although her work is quite extreme and some paintings have disturbing features, she portrays them for a reason and it’s refreshing to see imperfect bodies in today’s society.
Bibliography:
Jenny Saville, Published 2005, Rizzoli international publication 
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