Jenny Saville (born Cambridge, England, 1970) is a contemporary British painter and one of the Young British Artists (YBAs). She is known for her monumental images of obese women, usually using herself as the model.

Life

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She gained her degree at Glasgow School of Art (1988-1992), and was then awarded a six month scholarship to the University of Cincinnati, where she states that she saw "Lots of big women. Big white flesh in shorts and T-shirts. It was good to see because they had the physicality that I was interested in."

She studied at the Slade School Of Art 1992-1993. At the end of her postgraduate education at the Slade, the leading British art collector Charles Saatchi purchased her entire senior show and commissioned works for another two years. In 1994 she spent many hours observing plastic surgery operations in New York.

Today, Saville works and lives in London and is a tutor of figure painting at the Slade School of Art.

Art

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Saville does not meet the usual public perception of the YBAs, as she has a dedication to the "traditional" art of oil painting. Her painterly style has been compared to that of Lucian Freud and Rubens. Her paintings are usually much larger than life size. They are strongly pigmented and give a highly sensual impression of the surface of the skin as well as the mass of the body. She sometimes adds marks onto the body, such as white "target" rings.

Since her debut in 1992, her focus has remained on the body. Her published sketches and documents include surgical photographs of liposuction, trauma victims, deformity correction, disease states and transgender patients. ('Saville' by Simon Schama, 2005)

Her painting North Face/South Face appeared on the cover of The Manic Street Preachers third album The Holy Bible

Important exhibitions

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• Cooling Gallery, London, 1993, when Saatchi famously bought all her works.
• The controversial 'Sensation' exhibition at the Royal Academy of Art (1997) suddenly brought Saville's work to the attention of the British public at large.
• In 2002, she collaborated with photographer Glen Luchford to produce huge polaroids of herself taken from below, lying on a sheet of glass.

Saville has also exhibited widely around the world, including New York and Sweden and the United Kingdom

External links

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• Detailed biography
• Jenny Saville at Gagosian Gallery
• Saatchi Gallery Additional information on Jenny Saville including artworks, articles, text panels and full biography

1970 births | Living people | British painters | Contemporary painters | Women in art | Modern painters | People from Cambridge

Jenny Saville