Jenny Saville

In an interview for the Saatchi Gallery, Saville comments "I have to really work at the tension between getting the paint to have the sensory quality that I want and be constructive in terms of building the form of a stomach, for example, or creating the inner crevice of a thigh. The more I do it, the more the space between abstraction and figuration becomes interesting. I want a painting realism. I try to consider the pace of a painting, of active and quiet areas. Listening to music helps a lot, especially music where there’s a hard sound and then soft breathable passages."

Her nonconventional looks at beauty expands the traditional nude form into a way to comment on the body, gender politics, sexuality, and even self-realization. Her works often "depict distorted, fleshy, and disquieting female bodies" to provoke interest, confusion, questions, and excitement. Saville’s luscious yet grotesque treatment of painted bodies have elicited comparisons to Lucian Freud. “I paint flesh because I’m human,” she has said. “If you work in oil, as I do, it comes naturally. Flesh is just the most beautiful thing to paint.”"A confrontation with the dynamics of exposure… her exaggerated nudes point up, with an agonizing frankness, the disparity between the way women are perceived and the way that they feel about their bodies" Suzie Mackenzie. She plays upon the "ambiguity of embodiment" and what it means to be "feminine" or "beautiful" through the use of the distortion and "disgust". This "aesthetic of disgust" pushed people to the uncomfortable and forced many into the shoes of countless women in the Western world, giving some the autonomy to decide their own standard of beauty beyond society. The primary subject of all of Saville’s early works is the artist herself, and indeed throughout her oeuvre she has almost exclusively painted female subjects. Scholars like Loren Erdrich argue there is a direct link between the physical body, identity, and the self presented within Saville's subjects.

On 5 October 2018 Saville's Propped (1992) sold at Sothebys' in London for £9.5 million, above its £3-£4 million estimate, around $12.4 million US dollars, becoming the most expensive work by a living female artist sold at auction.

The album cover art placed second in a 2009 poll for Best Art Vinyl.

Saville's painting, Stare (2005), was used for the cover of the Manics' 2009 album Journal for Plague Lovers. The top four UK supermarkets stocked the CD in a plain slipcase, after the cover was deemed "inappropriate". The band's James Dean Bradfield said the decision was "utterly bizarre", and commented:

In 2004, Saville explored the idea of floating gender in her work Passage. Saville is quoted saying "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. Thirty or forty years ago this body couldn’t have existed and I was looking for a kind of contemporary architecture of the body. I wanted to paint a visual passage through gender – a sort of gender landscape."

In 2002, she collaborated with photographer Glen Luchford to produce huge Polaroids of herself taken from below, lying on a sheet of glass.

At the end of Saville's postgraduate education, the leading British art collector, Charles Saatchi, purchased her senior show. He offered the artist an 18-month contract, supporting her while she created new works to be exhibited in the Saatchi Gallery in London. The collection, Young British Artists III, exhibited in 1994 with Saville's self-portrait, Plan (1993), as the signature piece. Rising quickly to critical and public recognition and emerging as part of the Young British Artists (YBA) scene, Saville has been noted for creating art through the use of a classical standard—figure painting, but with a contemporary approach.

In 1994, Saville's painting Strategy (South Face/Front Face/North Face) appeared on the cover of Manic Street Preachers' third album The Holy Bible.

Since her debut in 1992, Saville's focus has remained on the female body. She has stated, "I'm drawn to bodies that emanate a sort of state of in-betweeness: hermaphrodite, a transvestite, a carcass, a half-alive/half-dead head.". In 1994, Saville spent many hours observing plastic surgery operations in New York City. Her published sketches and documents include surgical photographs of liposuction, trauma victims, deformity correction, disease states, and transgender patients. Much of her work features distorted flesh, high-caliber brush strokes, and patches of oil color, while others reveal the surgeon's mark of a plastic surgery operation or white "target" rings. 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. Saville's post-painterly style has been compared to that of Lucian Freud and Rubens.

Representations of the body is an important aspect of Jenny Saville's work. Saville's stylized nude portraits of voluminous female bodies have brought her international acclaim. She attributes most of her style and subjects to this theme of representations. Savilles' work Propped (1992), which is the most expensive work sold at an auction house by a living female artist, has been described as "one of the undisputed masterpieces of the Young British Artists" by Sothebys' European head of Contemporary Art, Alex Branczik. This piece is said to be so masterful because it is "the superlative self-portrait that shatters canonized representations of female beauty."

Jenny Saville RA (born 7 May 1970) is a contemporary British painter and an original member of the Young British Artists. She is known for her large-scale painted depictions of nude women. Saville has been credited with originating a new and challenging method of painting the female nude and reinventing figure painting for contemporary art. Saville works and lives in Oxford, England.

Saville was born on 7 May 1970 in Cambridge, England. Saville went to the Lilley and Stone School (now The Newark Academy) in Newark, Nottinghamshire, for her secondary education, later gaining her degree at Glasgow School of Art (1988–1992), and was then awarded a six-month scholarship to the University of Cincinnati where she enrolled in a course in women's studies. Saville was exposed to gender political ideas and renowned feminist writers. Saville states that during her time in Cincinnati, 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" – a physicality that she partially credits to Pablo Picasso, an artist that she sees as a painter that made subjects as if "they were solidly there...not fleeting.".