Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting

This astounding show brings together the very best of an incomparable artist: absorbing, transcendent, sublime

Jenny Saville, Hyphen, 1999. Oil on canvas, 274.3 x 365.8 cm. Private Collection, courtesy of Gagosian. © Jenny Saville, Courtesy Gagosian.

National Portrait Gallery, London
20 June – 7 September 2025

by ANNA McNAY

“Flesh is all things. Ugly, beautiful, repulsive, compelling, anxious, neurotic, dead, alive” – Jenny Saville

I remember first encountering the paintings of Jenny Saville (b1970, Cambridge) as a student and thinking they were amazing but also disgusting and not something I would want on my wall. To responses like this, Saville has said: “People say they’re good, but they couldn’t live with them. They’re not meant for that. I want them hung in public, all together, so they relate to each other, not be tucked away in people’s homes.” Certainly, seeing the works in the flesh (pun intended) is an entirely different experience from seeing them in a book or on a screen. They are immense. As in ginormous. Gargantuan. Frequently nine feet tall. You are not looking at a body, you are becoming a part of that body, that skin. The abjection of it all becomes so overwhelming that it is sublime. The viewer is left gasping for breath, completely absorbed into the painting.

Saville was born to educator parents and had a peripatetic childhood, crisscrossing the country and attending 15 different schools. Early on, her mother cleared out a walk-in cupboard, which became Saville’s first studio. “By the age of eight I was a committed artist,” she told the Standard in 2015. “Already I had decided that was what I was going to do with my life,” she says. In her teens, Saville became her artist-uncle’s “dogsbody” on his art historical tours of great cities. “I learned to draw in the Rialto fish market. I got up every morning at six and drew. And I used to drink red wine and Coca-Cola with them, because that’s what they would drink, and by 9.30 I’d be so pissed.”

Jenny Saville, Reverse, 2002-03. Oil on canvas, 213.4 x 243.8 cm. Private Collection, courtesy Gagosian © Jenny Saville.

Later, she attended Glasgow School of Art, where her uncle had also studied. During her first three years there, she worked as a waitress and a temp, but, in her fourth year, she devoted herself to her art, running up large debts in the process. She made great strides, however, exhibiting at the RCA Contemporary in 1990 while still a student. She also received a six-month fellowship to study at the University of Cincinnati in Ohio, where her lifelong fascination with the workings of the human body began to infiltrate her artwork. She recalls seeing many outsized female bodies in the US and becoming fascinated. “A large female body has a power; it occupies a physical space, yet there’s an anxiety about it. It has to be hidden,” she said in a Guardian interview in 2005. And in 2020, she told the Financial Times: “It was hard sometimes. I was a staunch feminist; I still am. So, in those days to paint a female nude was – well, what are you doing? But early on I learnt that I’m most effective when I address something directly. I want to trespass on every area that is a no-go for women, because that’ll open it up and make it free, even having children.”

When Saville graduated from Glasgow School of Art in 1992, the art collector Charles Saatchi purchased the whole of her degree show, erasing her debt, and he challenged Saville to make paintings to fill his gallery. Paying her to work from August 1992 until January 1994, Saatchi then put on an exhibition of Saville’s work. “What he did for me was amazing,” she said in the 2005 Guardian interview. “I didn’t have lots of money. I make big paintings; I couldn’t afford to invest the time or money. Who would show them, let alone buy them. Charles was like: ‘Whatever you want, whatever is your dream, do it.’ Things I’d wanted to do for ages, I could do. And it made me a bigger artist.”

Jenny Saville, Propped, 1992. Oil on canvas, 213.4 x 182.9 cm. Private Collection. © Jenny Saville, Courtesy Gagosian.

The work that really made her “Jenny Saville, artist” is Propped (1992). As you enter the exhibition in London’s National Portrait Gallery, it is the first piece to confront you – and I don’t choose the word “confront” lightly, because it really is a challenging picture. Giant and shockingly distorted, it is nevertheless a lusciously painted nude self-portrait of the artist “propped” on a stool. When it was first displayed, it was shown opposite a mirror, so that the reverse writing, inscribed across the body, could be read. The text is taken from an essay by the French feminist writer Luce Irigaray: “If we continue to speak in this sameness – speak as men have spoken for centuries, we will fail each other.” This really speaks to and calms Saville’s qualms about painting the female nude. She is doing so, but differently. Propped sold in 2018 for £9.5m, a record auction price for a living female artist. It was described by a Sotheby’s contemporary art expert as “one of the undisputed masterpieces” from the YBA (Young British Artists) school.

Jenny Saville, Rupture, 2020. Acrylic and oil on linen, 200 x 160 cm. Private Collection. © Jenny Saville, Courtesy Gagosian.

In 1994, Saville moved to New York City for a time. While there, she spent long hours observing the work of Dr Barry Martin Weintraub, a plastic surgeon based in the city. She took photographs while standing in on cosmetic surgeries and liposuctions and gained a better understanding of the human body and the various manipulations that can be made through modern medicine. Plan (1993) shows a woman marked up for surgery with topographical-like lines. It is hung so that the pubic hair is at eye level. Saville told Hunter Davies in the Independent in 1994: “In history, pubic hair has always been perfect, painted by men. In real life, it moves around, up your stomach, or down your legs.” Indeed, here, there are dark, shadowy suggestions on the thundering thighs. The impasto paintwork suggests cellulite and the underside of the breasts are squashed and mottled. Standing close, this is not a body, it is a map. An expanse of flesh. I cannot help but think of Mark Rothko and his colour field paintings. The artist advised viewers to experience his large-scale paintings from a very close distance, ideally about 18in (46cm). This intimate perspective was meant to create a sense of engulfment and transcendence, allowing viewers to feel fully immersed in the colour. This same effect is felt standing in front of a Saville.

Another artist who comes to mind is, of course, Lucian Freud. Asked by Davies how she felt about comparison with Freud, Saville replied: “If you do figurative painting today, you are bound to have been influenced by Freud, but he hasn’t been as influential as some people make out. I don’t give my figures a setting. They are never in a room. There is no narrative. It’s flesh, and the paint itself is the body.” Instead, she has been influenced by the altarpieces of Titian and Tintoretto in Venice, especially when it comes to scale. Working so big is in a large part to be “masculine” and overarchingly “to be taken seriously”. At just 5ft 2in, Saville has to work standing on a stepladder, often unclothed, with a large mirror. She prints huge photographs, often almost full scale, and paints in sections. The photographs, she says, “give [her] a structural and tonal scaffolding”.

Jenny Saville, Ruben's Flap. Oil on canvas, 304.8 x 243.8 cm. 1998-99. The George Economou Collection. © Jenny Saville, Courtesy Gagosian.

Ruben’s Flap (1999), also hanging with these early works, is delicious in the soft, roundedness of the bellies and breasts. One can almost feel the intimate contact between them. Saville told Davies: “I paint women as most women see themselves. I try to catch their identity, their skin, their hair, their heat, their leakiness.”

The next room unquestionably has the greatest impact. On entering, you are met by lots of pairs of staring eyes. The voyeur becomes the “vu” (“seen”); the hunter becomes the prey. Three heads on the facing wall are all looking the same way – Red Stare Head IV (2006-11), Bleach (2008) and Shadow Head (2007-13) – and Red Stare is reflected on the right-hand-side wall by Red Stare Head II (2007-11), which is a (subtly different) mirror image. These two works really belong with Stare (2004-05), which hangs in the corridor, along with the explanatory wall text that says the series is derived from a small image of a young woman with a port-wine birthmark on her face, which Saville found in a medical book, and from which she ad libbed into an exploration of painting through colour.

Jenny Saville, Stare, 2004-05. Oil on canvas, 305 x 250 cm. The Broad Art Foundation. © Jenny Saville, Courtesy Gagosian

Unlike the earlier works, these are not self-portraits. Not that Saville considers her paintings as such. “Women have usually only taken the role of model. I'm both, artist and model. I’m also the viewer, so I have three roles,” she told Davies. She has also talked about “lending [her] body to [her]self”. Self-Portrait after Rembrandt (2019), which also hangs in the corridor, is, however, explicitly a self-portrait, and it provides another insight into how Saville takes inspiration and tips from great artists past. With reference to this picture, she has spoken specifically about the way Rembrandt used the other end of the brush to draw into the paint, and how she learned from him how “to turn the volume up” at different points in the composition.

Jenny Saville, Rosetta II, 2005-06. Oil on watercolour paper mounted on board, 252 x 187.5 cm. Private collection. © Jenny Saville, Courtesy Gagosian.

Bleach is a curious work, which almost doesn’t belong with its friends, as there is no blood or red on the canvas. Questions loom as to what the bleach of the title refers. Was there a bleach attack? Possibly. Has the muse merely bleached her hair? Unlikely. Does it refer to the bleaching of colour from the image? Certainly. Whatever way you see it, the painting is actually very beautiful, despite its broken surface. Rosetta II (2005-06), in a side room of its own (with two pencil sketches: one related, one not), shares the same palette. It couldn’t be included with the staring images, since Rosetta is blind. Saville painted the picture of a woman she met in Naples, and she describes it as the first beautiful painting that she made. Previously, she was scared of beauty and thought that if something was beautiful it wouldn’t be taken seriously, but working with Rosetta, who was filled with self-hatred about how she looked and didn’t think she deserved to be someone’s muse, the artist realised it was, in fact, OK to paint beauty. The work also cites Picasso’s La Celestina as an influence, and Saville hopes it “calls to mind the classical idea of the mysticism of a blind person’s stare”. Indeed, although the eyes are glazed over, the stare is every bit as intense, if not more so, than the searing pairs of eyes next door.

Next, we come to a room filled with drawings of Saville as a mother, with wriggling, fidgeting, sprawling infants, whose perpetual movement is captured in pentimenti across the surface of the work. Saville told the FT: “People used to say: you can’t make paintings about children, it’ll destroy your career, it’ll be chocolate-box, saccharine. But it’s profound thing to give birth; I didn’t want to ignore it, I wanted to navigate it, address it straight on.” She has also talked about the total freedom that children have, “scribbling across paper, the way they paint without any need for form. I thought: I fancy a bit of that myself.” The results are tender. Loving. Hesitant. Digging (Study) II (2015) shows two young boys at play, while Study of Arms II: A response to Titian’s Study of a Young Woman, Uffizi, Florence (2015) is all about softness and movement. These works are 180 degrees different from the earlier paintings, but they are every bit as absorbing. And, again, there are clear references to great masters past. Speaking to the Times in 2011, Saville described Leonardo’s sketch for the Burlington House Cartoon as “the greatest drawing ever made in the history of art”, continuing that it pre-empts everything else that happens in art up to abstraction. “You see it in Giacometti, you see it Auerbach now, this sort of energetic mass of forms …”

Jenny Saville, Aleppo, 2017-18. Pastel and charcoal on canvas, 200 x 160 cm. Collection of the artist. © Jenny Saville, courtesy NGS.

Clearly continuing from these compositions, we enter a room filled with interlocking figures. These are new. I have not seen them before. My first impression is that I like them less. Made in pastel and charcoal, there is no glorious flesh and no challenging gaze; instead, they are all about creating sculptural formations out of entwined bodies. Saville said in Gagosian Quarterly in 2019: “I’ve learned that spontaneity is important when working with models, especially groups of bodies, because when people interact, they create forms that I couldn’t imagine before they arrive in my studio.” Odalisque (2012-14) certainly has a wonderful passage of tangled feet, highlighted with an exaggerated spill of bright white paint. I could spend time with this work.

Aleppo (2017-18), constructed triangularly, like a pietà, captures the chaos, fragmentation and loss of self that is doubtless experienced by refugees. Near to this, Pietà I (2019-21) is a direct use of this form, and was made in response to Michelangelo’s unfinished marble sculpture, the Pietà Bandini, alongside which it was first shown in the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, Florence, in 2021, as part of an extensive show across five Florentine museums, placing Saville’s work in dialogue with the Italian Renaissance artists Sandro Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo. She described the experience as “the project of my life as an artist” and said: “I thought Michelangelo was a genius before I did this project, but now my admiration for him is a lot deeper. For instance, the Pietà sculpture: every angle, every fold of cloth, every turn of a wrist was used to create emotional depth, without sentimentality. It is a difficult road to walk, to condense humanity without it becoming a cliché. That’s what I’ve learned from what he did.”

Jenny Saville, Pieta I, 2019-21. © Jenny Saville, courtesy The George Economou Collection

The final room of the exhibition is full of colour. The heads on display here are fashioned in reds and blues, yellows and greens. Before the pandemic, Saville went to Moscow, and, while there, she “kept seeing these fascinating faces”. The outcome was that she hired a photographic studio and began taking lots of pictures. In the studio, she found a variety of coloured backdrops, so she began working for the first time with a red background. Again, to me, these works are not as impactful as her early ones, because there is no real sense of fleshiness or endlessness or immensity of something normally bounded by the body. Also, again, there is no eye contact. However, Saville told the Brooklyn Rail in 2021: “By just having heads I was able to concentrate. It was liberating to have something so solid and working off that became exciting. I’ve also used a lot of oil bars, and they come in this amazing range of bright tones and hues. I’ve got this big range of sticks in front of me, like big lipsticks. They’re creamy and you can move them in and out of tonal paint and build them up like tapestries.” The compositions, too, are built up using multiple images. Sometimes, extra eyes or ears remain visible in the finished paintings. At other times, there is a simple sense of depth. Prism (2020), for example, comprises at least 30 different heads.

Jenny Saville, Latent, 2020-22. Acrylic and pastel on canvas, 150 x 120 cm. © Jenny Saville, courtesy The George Economou Collection

These recent works are also much influenced by digital technology. Latent (2020-22), for example, references “latent space”, a concept in artificial intelligence that refers to the analysis of hidden structural similarities between visual data. Other works seem to look backwards, with titles such as Messenger (2020-21) (this painting incorporates a beautiful rainbow) and Chasah (2020), a biblical term meaning to seek refuge or protection (if you look carefully, this picture beautifully incorporates a reflection of the artist in the sitter’s eyes). The final few works, including Stanza (2020-22), are collages, created by overlaying multiple digital images, focusing on the space between layers, and the results are the most bravely abstract yet. Saville said in the Brooklyn Rail interview: “I tried to make something that embodies form and formlessness simultaneously … That’s very difficult to do in paint, to make it have absolute, solid form in a recognised way and complete abstraction. It’s a ridiculous aim, really, but the work is a document of that endeavour.” For Saville, “the marriage of [Francis] Bacon and [Willem] de Kooning – Bacon’s figurative skills and de Kooning’s painting skills – would make the best painter who ever lived.”

The final work on display is Eve (2022-23), in which Saville experiments with allowing drips of yellow paint to run down the canvas, over the open eyes, mingling like sweat and tears. But what strikes me most about this work is the burden of titling something Eve. For many – if not most – artists, this would be too great an onus, but if anyone can face the challenge and stand up to it, Saville can. If I lived nearer, I would be returning to this exhibition daily, to sit and contemplate one painting a day. It is that engrossing. That awe-inspiring. That all-consuming. Go now and take your time to be absorbed.