Jenny Saville

Jenny Saville (b. 1970) is a British painter acclaimed for her monumental depictions of the human body, rendered with visceral intensity and psychological depth. Emerging in the 1990s as part of the YBA (Young British Artists) generation, she quickly distinguished herself through a powerful engagement with flesh, form and identity. Saville studied at the Glasgow School of Art, developing a painterly language that draws on the legacy of Lucian Freud, Rubens and Titian, while responding to contemporary discourses around gender, corporeality and representation.

Her early works, including Branded and Plan, challenged prevailing ideals of beauty by presenting the female body in exaggerated, sometimes confrontational scale. She used oil paint with extraordinary physicality, layering impastoed marks to evoke the texture and weight of flesh. Often working from life, medical imagery or her own body, Saville explored themes of trauma, transformation and the blurred boundaries between interior and exterior selves.

Over time, her practice expanded to include multi-figure compositions, experimental mark-making and fragmented anatomy. Her later works suggest a more fluid sense of identity, with bodies folding into and over one another, often evoking themes of motherhood, metamorphosis and classical art.

Though frequently categorised as a figurative painter, Saville’s work resists neat classification. Her canvases function both as raw meditations on physicality and as conceptual inquiries into how the body is constructed, perceived and politicised. She has exhibited internationally, including major retrospectives at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art and the Norton Museum of Art, and her paintings are held in significant public and private collections.