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Sunday 16 February

Jenny Saville: The Pictorial Reinvention of the Body

Published on: 11 December 2024

By: Hervé Lancelin

Category: Art review

Reading time: 8 minutes

Jenny Saville revolutionizes the representation of the body through her monumental canvases. Her brutal yet sophisticated technique creates a tactile surface where violent brushstrokes contrast with areas of surgical precision, reflecting the constant tension between raw materiality and psychological depth.

Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs parading around galleries with your cashmere scarves and architectural glasses. I’m going to talk to you about Jenny Saville, born in 1970, the British artist who dynamites the conventions of body representation with the subtlety of a nuclear explosion and the precision of a neurosurgeon.

Flesh. Always flesh. Since her explosive emergence in contemporary art, Saville has established herself as the high priestess of a new form of figurative painting where the pictorial material becomes as visceral as flesh itself. Her monumental canvases, often over two meters high, are not mere representations of bodies but quasi-corporeal manifestations that pull you into their physical dimension. This is art that grabs you by the guts, literally.

The story begins at the Glasgow School of Art, where young Saville developed a fascination for representing the female body. A scholarship to Cincinnati marked a decisive turning point. There, on American streets, she discovered the opulent bodies that would become her signature. She observed, fascinated, these silhouettes defying traditional aesthetic canons. This experience, combined with her later observations in plastic surgery operating rooms, forged her unique artistic vision.

Take Propped (1992), auctioned for 9.5 million euros in 2018—a record for a living artist at the time. This massive canvas features a monumental female nude with inscriptions etched backward into the paint. Saville revisits the tradition of the female nude with an assumed brutality echoing Simone de Beauvoir’s reflections on the female body as a social construct. The body is no longer an object of desire but a subject of its own narrative, marked by the stigmas of a society that constrains and shapes it. The inscriptions, deliberately rendered illegible feminist quotes, create a tension between text and flesh, between discourse on the body and its physical reality.

Plan (1993) pushes this exploration further. On this immense canvas, a female body is marked with contour lines like a topographical map of flesh. These clinical annotations, inspired by preoperative markings from plastic surgery, transform the body into a territory to conquer and modify. It’s a scathing critique of the beauty industry but also a profound reflection on our relationship with the body in the era of its technical reproducibility.

In Closed Contact (1995-1996), created in collaboration with photographer Glen Luchford, Saville pushes experimentation to the point of pressing her own body against a plexiglass sheet. The result is a series of images where flesh, crushed and deformed, becomes unrecognizable. This work marks a turning point in her practice, introducing a performative dimension that enriches her painting.

Saville’s technique is as brutal as it is sophisticated. She applies paint in thick layers, creating a tactile surface that almost invites touch. Her broad, violent brushstrokes contrast with areas of surgical precision, especially in rendering eyes and mouths. This technical duality reflects the constant tension in her work between the raw materiality of the body and its psychological dimension.

Matrix (1999) marks a significant evolution in her treatment of gender. This work features a body with ambiguous sexual attributes, blurring the boundaries between masculine and feminine. The figure, monumental as always, occupies the space with a troubling presence. The genitals, placed in the foreground, directly confront the viewer’s biases about sexual identity. It’s a work that remarkably anticipates contemporary debates on gender fluidity.

Fulcrum (1999) perhaps represents the pinnacle of her early period. This monumental canvas, nearly five meters wide, features three intertwined female bodies, creating a mountain of flesh that defies conventional notions of beauty. The composition recalls baroque sculpted groups but transposes this grandiloquence into a resolutely contemporary context. The bodies, in their imposing mass, become a carnal landscape, a new form of the sublime that transcends traditional aesthetic categories.

In her artistic evolution, Saville has gradually moved away from pure anatomical representation to explore a form of fleshy cubism. Her recent works, like the Fate series (2018), superimpose multiple viewpoints of the same body, creating compositions where flesh seems to multiply in space. This approach echoes Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s theories on the phenomenology of perception, where the body is no longer simply an object in space but the focal point of all lived experience.

Saville’s transgression lies not so much in her subjects but in her treatment of them. She takes the conventions of classical painting—the nude, the portrait, the monumentality—and turns them inside out like a bloodied glove. Her approach recalls the controlled violence of Francis Bacon, but whereas Bacon disfigured his subjects, Saville reconfigures them, creating a new grammar of the body.

The influence of her observations in operating rooms is particularly evident in works like Hybrid (1997). This canvas features a body composed of different parts, like a patchwork of flesh. It’s reminiscent of Renaissance anatomical plates but with a contemporary dimension evoking the possibilities and anxieties surrounding bodily modification. The work thus becomes a commentary on our era, where the body is increasingly seen as malleable and modifiable at will.

The gigantism of her canvases is not just a matter of scale; it’s a philosophical choice. In Western art tradition, monumentality was reserved for noble subjects—religious scenes, historical battles. Saville uses this format for ordinary bodies, often marked by imperfection, creating a tension between the grandeur of the format and the apparent banality of the subject. This approach echoes Walter Benjamin’s reflections on the democratization of art but reverses the process: instead of making art accessible to the masses, she makes the masses monumental.

Her use of color deserves particular attention. Her palette, dominated by pinks, reds, and milky whites, evokes living, pulsing flesh. But she doesn’t hesitate to introduce colder tones—blues and greens suggesting bruising, decomposition—reminding us that the body is also the site of mortality. This chromatic tension contributes to the existential dimension of her work.

Motherhood has become a central theme in her recent work. Her representations of mothers with their children are part of a long pictorial tradition but subvert its codes. Where tradition idealized motherhood, Saville shows its physical, sometimes brutal dimension. The bodies of mothers and children merge, creating compositions that evoke both symbiosis and struggle.

In her latest works, Saville increasingly explores the boundary between figuration and abstraction. Bodies partially dissolve into swirls of paint as if the pictorial material itself rebels against the constraint of form. This evolution reflects an artistic maturation that sacrifices none of its initial power.

Her Ancestors series (2018) marks a significant turning point. These works incorporate explicit references to art history, notably the Italian Renaissance, but transform them radically. Figures intertwine and overlap, creating carnal testimonies that blur the boundaries between past and present, individual and collective.

The treatment of space in her works deserves attention. Unlike traditional portraits often placing the subject in a defined context, Saville’s figures seem to float in an indeterminate space. This absence of spatial context enhances their physical presence while giving them a universal dimension. The bodies become contemporary archetypes, incarnations of our complex relationship with corporality.

The performative aspect of her work should not be overlooked. While Saville is primarily known as a painter, her practice often involves a significant physical dimension. Whether in her photographic collaborations or her way of working the paint, she engages her own body in the creative process. This performative dimension establishes a direct link between the act of painting and the subject painted.

The gaze is central to her work. Her figures often look directly at us with an intensity that defies objectification. This direct gaze establishes a complex relationship with the viewer, mixing defiance and vulnerability. It forces us to acknowledge our position as voyeurs while affirming the autonomy of the represented subject.

Her latest body of work marks a significant evolution. Bodies are no longer merely masses of flesh but become spaces of transformation and metamorphosis. The boundaries between figures blur, creating hybrids reminiscent of Ovid’s metamorphoses but rooted in a brutal contemporaneity. This new artistic direction suggests broader reflections on fluid identity and the changing nature of the body in the digital age.

The political dimension of her work, while never didactic, is undeniable. By choosing to represent bodies that deviate from dominant aesthetic norms, by showing flesh in all its vulnerability and power, Saville offers an implicit critique of beauty standards and the power systems that impose them. Her work can be read as a feminist manifesto that doesn’t rely on discourse but on sheer physical presence.

Her contribution to art history is already assured. She has successfully reinvented figurative painting at a time when many considered it obsolete. By fusing the legacy of great painting with a contemporary sensibility, she has created a unique pictorial language that speaks directly to our bodily experience in the 21st century.

Jenny Saville is not simply an artist who paints bodies. She is a philosopher of flesh, using painting as her investigative tool. Her work forces us to confront our own corporality, our biases about beauty, and our complex relationship with our physical selves. In an increasingly virtual world, her work reminds us with visceral urgency that we are, above all, beings of flesh and blood.

That is the true power of Saville: she doesn’t just represent the body; she reinvents it. She doesn’t merely paint flesh; she makes it a manifesto. And you, little snobs in cashmere scarves, it’s time to recognize that the true greatness of contemporary art lies not in ethereal concepts but in its ability to make us feel—physically and emotionally—the reality of our human condition. Faced with a Saville canvas, it’s impossible to remain in intellectual abstraction: the body reclaims its rights, in all its splendor and imperfection.

Reference(s)

Jenny SAVILLE (1970)
First name: Jenny
Last name: SAVILLE
Gender: Female
Nationalitie(s):

  • United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

Age: 55 years old (2025)

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