What is Jenny Saville Known For
In a world saturated with polished perfection and digital idealism, few artists have dared to confront the raw, unfiltered, and sometimes unsettling reality of the human body quite like Jenny Saville. With sweeping brushstrokes and monumental canvases, Saville has carved a place for herself among the titans of contemporary art. Her paintings don’t merely depict flesh, they inhabit it, engulfing the viewer in cascading folds, bruises, blood, and truth. In an art world historically dominated by the male gaze, Saville’s work reclaims the body, particularly the female body, with audacity, power, and often, disturbing beauty.
Born in Cambridge, England, in 1970, Jenny Saville showed an early aptitude for art. Her education at the Glasgow School of Art laid the foundation for her future brilliance. However, her career truly took flight after being discovered by British art collector Charles Saatchi in the early 1990s. Saatchi, a major patron of the Young British Artists (YBAs), offered her an 18-month contract and financial support. With this backing, Saville created works that instantly catapulted her to fame, aligning her with the likes of Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin. Yet, Saville stood out, not just because she was one of the few prominent women in this group, but because her work looked nothing like her contemporaries’. Where others employed shock tactics or conceptual installations, Saville wielded oil paint like a scalpel and celebrated the tactile intensity of the flesh.
Saville is primarily known for her large-scale, hyperrealistic depictions of the human body, often female and often in states of transformation, surgery, or decay. Her paintings are visceral. The figures she renders don’t adhere to classical beauty or idealized forms. Instead, they confront societal norms around body image, gender, and identity.
Saville has explored a variety of themes throughout her career:
Obesity and body politics
Plastic surgery and cosmetic modification
Transgender and non-binary identities
Birth and motherhood
Pain, vulnerability, and transformation
One of her most well-known early works, “Propped” (1992), features a nude woman staring directly at the viewer. Her massive thighs are pressed together, arms outstretched, and her flesh distorted by the pressure. Scratched into the surface of the painting is a feminist text by French philosopher Luce Irigaray. The result is unignorable: powerful, accusatory, self-aware.
How Does Jenny Saville Make Her Artwork?
Jenny Saville’s process is deeply tactile and intensely physical. She primarily works in oil paint, often on huge canvases, some as large as 10 feet wide. She applies the paint in thick, layered strokes, working and reworking the surface until it mirrors the complexity of human flesh. Unlike traditional portrait artists who may seek to refine and smooth, Saville leans into imperfection, creating works that feel alive, breathing, and bleeding.
Her studio practice is methodical yet organic. She often begins with photographs, sometimes of models, medical textbooks, or her own body. She is known to layer multiple images to create composite figures, blending genders and identities into hybrid, ambiguous forms.
Saville is also influenced by classical artists such as Leonardo da Vinci, Titian, Rubens, and Rembrandt, particularly in their treatment of flesh and their understanding of anatomy. However, her painterly technique is very much her own: gestural, physical, and emotionally charged.
In addition to oil painting, Saville sometimes incorporates charcoal, pastel, photographic transfers, and even surgical imagery. The results are works that feel like they’ve been excavated rather than painted, portraits that expose not just skin but psyche.
What Art Style is Jenny Saville Associated With?
Jenny Saville is often associated with Contemporary Figurative Painting, with strong influences from:
Expressionism
Realism
Baroque painting
Body Art
Feminist Art
Although part of the Young British Artists (YBA) movement, her style diverges from many of her peers due to her dedication to figurative realism and traditional oil painting techniques.
Her style is also often described as Neo-Figurative, a revival of the human figure in painting during a period when abstraction and conceptualism dominated. Her works share kinship with artists like Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon, both of whom explored the human body with intensity and distortion.
Saville’s feminism, though not always overt in her interviews, is embedded in her work. Her paintings challenge the idea of the “male gaze” and refuse to present women as decorative or passive subjects. Her bodies are active, wounded, birthing, aging, transforming.
What Are Jenny Saville’s Most Famous Artworks?
While Jenny Saville has a broad body of work, several pieces stand out as landmark contributions to modern painting:
1. “Propped” (1992)
Arguably her most iconic painting, Propped features a monumental nude woman staring defiantly at the viewer. The surface is carved with feminist text, and the work serves as a powerful commentary on self-image and objectification.
In 2018, “Propped” sold for a record-breaking £9.5 million ($12.4 million) at Sotheby’s, making Saville the most expensive living female artist at that time.
2. “Plan” (1993)
This painting features a large woman covered in blue surgical markings, a direct reference to cosmetic surgery. It comments on the growing obsession with body modification and questions the arbitrary standards of beauty.
3. “Matrix” (1999)
A vast, multi-paneled painting, Matrix presents a collage of different body types, identities, and textures. It’s a celebration of human complexity and gender fluidity.
4. “Fulcrum” (1999)
This work features three obese female bodies intertwined in a tangle of flesh. The composition evokes classical paintings of reclining nudes, but reinterprets them with raw honesty and vulnerability.
5. “Reverse” (2003)
A layered, abstracted face created with mirrored forms and photographic sources, showing Saville’s movement toward more fragmented, psychological portraits.
How Many Artworks Does Jenny Saville Have?
As of 2025, Jenny Saville has created over 100 major artworks, including paintings, drawings, and mixed-media works. Because of the sheer scale and labor-intensive nature of her process, her output is relatively limited compared to other contemporary artists. She can spend months or even years on a single painting, revising, scraping, repainting, and layering until the final form emerges.
Her drawings and smaller-scale studies are more numerous, and many are held in private collections or institutions. However, each piece, regardless of size, is a monument in its own right, reflecting her obsessive attention to detail and anatomy.
What Materials Does Jenny Saville Use?
Saville primarily uses:
Oil paints – Her medium of choice for most major works, providing the texture and layering she’s known for.
Charcoal and graphite – For initial sketches and preparatory drawings.
Canvas and linen – Often enormous in scale.
Photographic references – For anatomical accuracy and layered compositions.
Pastels and mixed media – In her drawings and studies.
Digital and photographic overlays – Especially in later works, where she blends realism with abstraction.
Her mastery of materials is apparent in the way she captures translucent skin, stretch marks, blood vessels, and the sheer weight of flesh. There’s a sculptural dimension to her painting, as though she’s molding bodies out of pigment.
How Much Does Jenny Saville’s Artwork Cost?
Jenny Saville’s paintings are among the most valuable by any living artist, especially any living female artist.
Auction record: “Propped” (1992) sold for £9.5 million ($12.4 million) in 2018.
General price range: Her major oil paintings typically sell for £1 million to £10 million, depending on scale and significance.
Drawings and studies: Smaller pieces and drawings can range from £100,000 to £500,000.
Commissioned or gallery-sold works: These are often sold privately, but experts estimate similar price brackets.
This high market value not only reflects the demand for her work but also a growing recognition of her historic importance in modern art.
Where Is Jenny Saville’s Artwork Located?
Saville’s works are housed in numerous public and private collections around the world. Some key locations include:
Public Collections:
The Metropolitan Museum of Art – New York City, USA
The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) – New York City, USA
The Broad – Los Angeles, USA
Tate Modern – London, UK
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art – Edinburgh, Scotland
The Saatchi Gallery – London, UK
Private Collections:
Many of her paintings reside in high-profile private collections, especially in Europe, the United States, and the Middle East. Charles Saatchi remains one of her most prominent collectors and early supporters.
Jenny Saville Legacy and Influence
Jenny Saville’s impact on contemporary art cannot be overstated. She has:
Redefined figurative painting in an era dominated by conceptual and digital art.
Empowered female artists through unapologetically feminist themes.
Expanded representations of gender, body, and identity in fine art.
Influenced a new generation of figurative painters, especially those interested in raw, emotive representations of the human form.
While many of her contemporaries shifted to multimedia or performance art, Saville has remained steadfast in her commitment to paint and canvas. In doing so, she has proved that traditional materials, when wielded with innovation and passion, can still change the course of art history.
The Skin We Live In
Jenny Saville doesn’t ask for your attention, she demands it. Her bodies sprawl across canvases like wounded gods, commanding space, agency, and empathy. Her paintings are not polite; they are forceful, brutal, and sublime.
In a world obsessed with filters and digital ideals, Jenny Saville paints the truth. A messy, human, beautiful truth. And perhaps that is what makes her not just a painter of bodies, but a painter of existence itself. image/wikiart.org
