JENNY SAVILLE: Gaze

Saville's fleshy oil portraits subvert conventional understandings of beauty standards

The renowned British artist Jenny Saville explores the centuries-old tradition of body imagery. Ancient or Christian iconographies serve as a model for her exploration of composition and space-figure-surface arrangements. She is ultimately concerned with the development of a hybrid canon of forms that uses its models as a starting point for updating what has been handed down historically. Saville's depictions of the human figure oscillate between the idealization of form and its deconstruction. Drawing inspiration from art history―from Old Masters such Leonardo and Raphael to Schiele, Picasso, Bacon and Freud―she creates paintings characterized by corporeality, physicality and the interplay of new and old techniques. Whether portraying history, the bodies of others or herself, her work consistently transcends conventional notions of beauty and ugliness. Gaze offers retrospective insight into the development of Saville's artistic practice over the last 20 years and includes new works shown for the first time.
Jenny Saville (born 1970) studied at the Glasgow School of Art in the late 1980s and early '90s before becoming associated with the loose generational cohort of painters and sculptors known as the Young British Artists (YBAs). She showed in the Royal Academy of Arts' famed Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection exhibition in 1997 alongside Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas.