Jenny Saville

The power of her brilliant and relentless embodiment of our worst anxieties about our own corporeality and gender is what distinguishes Saville from other paint-obsessed representers of the naked human body.

Paint, she says, is her language, the way she communicates – and everything else, everything else, takes second place. She can’t see herself having children. “I dunno really. I look at my brother and he has a wife, children, holidays. I don’t recognise myself in that at all. I wouldn’t want it any other way. My life is subservient to painting – I can’t find a substitute for it in the world.”

Jenny Saville, perhaps better known as a painter, has collaborated with Glen Luchford on a series where her nude body is distorted by lying on glass.

Untitled (Study)

Jenny Saville: With the transvestite I was searching for a body that was between genders. I had explored that idea a little in Matrix. The idea of floating gender that is not fixed. The transvestite I worked with has a natural penis and false silicone breasts…

Saville draws much from the history of painting, especially artists known for pushing the human figure to its limits of stress and decomposition. Saville has mentioned Velasquez’s tonal virtuosity, the carcass paintings of Soutine and Rembrandt, as well as Willem De Kooning’s notion that “Flesh was the reason oil paint was invented” as key influences. Critics are quick to add a roster of British painters such as Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach, and Lucian Freud as important forerunners and inspirations for Saville’s work. What seems to separate Saville from her influences, however, is her reliance on conceptual, critical social messages instead of subjective expression.