(gagosian.com)
Jenny Saville’s approach to the canvas is one of confrontation and challenge. Her subjects are fleshy behemoths, often female forms that push against the edges of the frame, spilling over and beyond the conventional boundaries of beauty and taste. They are not the nymphs or odalisques of historical portraiture but titanic figures that demand we acknowledge the reality of the body in all its mass and mess.
Saville’s work claims female form from the male gaze that has long dominated art history. Her figures are not offered for the viewer’s taste but assert their presence, imposing a physicality that cannot be ignored. In this, Saville aligns herself with a tradition of painters who have sought to render the body with harsh honesty, from Lucian Freud to Francis Bacon, while also defying that tradition as well.
Saville’s comprehensive work is a defiant denial of the sanitized body, the body as it is sold to us in advertisements and has undergone cosmetic surgery. Instead, Saville presents the viewer with a visceral reality, a raw form that some may find uncomfortable. Her paintings don’t merely display bodies. The thick, palpable layers of paint mimic the layers of skin and tissue, while the often blurred or smeared features convey a sense of movement.
Saville has been criticized for her fixation on the grotesque, which some see as an indulgence in the carnal. Yet, what these criticisms often miss is the empathy at the heart of her work. Saville’s bodies are not spectacles; they are embodiments of experience – distinct lives lived in the physical world. They are marred and marked by existence, and there is beauty in this that Saville captures without sentimentality.
In pieces such as Plan and Fulcrum, Saville explores the body as a landscape, with folds of flesh rendered as terrain. She questions the viewer’s own relationship with their body, prompting a reflection that is as existential as it is physical. Saville’s paintings resist easy consumption. They are not restful or pleasing in any traditional sense. They are a reminder that art can confront and disturb, shuffling us from complacent observation to active engagement.
