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Jenny Saville

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File:Saville, Closed Contact 10.jpg
Closed Contact #10, 1996.

Jenny Saville (born in Cambridge in 1970) is an English painter and a leading Young British Artist (YBA). Saville is known for her monumental images of women, usually self portraits.

Life and work

Saville 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."[1] She studied at the Slade School Of Art between 1992 and 1993. At the end of her postgraduate education the leading British art collector Charles Saatchi purchased her entire senior show and commissioned works for the next two years. In 1994 Saville spent many hours observing plastic surgery operations in New York.

Saville does not meet the usual public perception of the YBAs as she has dedicated her career to traditional figurative 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.

File:Torso2.jpg
Torso2, 2004, oil on canvas, 360cm x 294cm, by Jenny Saville Saatchi Gallery.

Since her debut in 1992, Saville's focus has remained on the female body. Her published sketches and documents include surgical photographs of liposuction, trauma victims, deformity correction, disease states and transgender patients.[2] Her painting Strategy (South Face/Front Face/North Face) appeared on the cover of Manic Street Preachers' third album The Holy Bible.[3]

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

Exhibitions

  • Cooling Gallery, London, 1993, when Saatchi 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.

Notes and references

  1. ^ "Jenny Saville Biography". Artbank.com. Retrieved on February 05, 2008.
  2. ^ Schama, Simon. "Jenny Saville". The Saatchi Gallery, 2005. Retrieved on 06 February, 2008.
  3. ^ Middles, Mick. "Manic Street Preachers". London: Omnibus Press, January 2000. p.136. ISBN 0-7119-7738-0
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