+

JENNY
SAVILLE
b. May 7
th
, 1970, England
+
Introduction
Saville is well known for her monumental nude female figures
and portraits, painted with a furious application of confident
expressive strokes.
The scale of her figures indicates the psycho- logical space the
body takes up in our collective psyches
We are obsessed with diets, nutrition, physical fitness, health,
vanity, self-esteem. Savilles somber, adult lens, directed towards
the nude and her interest in surgical and biological metamorphosis
reveals an almost a different view of the human form.

+
Subject Matter / Experiences
While Savilles paintings have the feeling of sculpted paint, the
bodies and faces she depicts often seem to have been
physically assaulted -- beaten, scratched, cut, stretched,
pushed and pulled, prodded, scarred, cut, bound, scraped, etc.
Her past experiences witnessing face-lifts, compounded with
her time spent sketching corpses in morgues, have given her a
usually well-informed understanding of the insides of the body.
Whether plastic surgery or sexual reassignment surgery,
Savilles interest has been the body in transformation.
+
Culture of the body
Savilles work do not excite or entertain, but asks larger
questions about what it means to inhabit a body in the late 20th
and early 21st century.
We are all born with this flesh and these bones, and no matter
how we choose to alter them, they remain ours. Then theyre
gone.
+
Leah Cross Freelance Writer
Jenny Savilles painting presents the questionability of the female
nude. Traditionally, the female nude was presented as beautiful,
graceful and modest, as seen in examples such as Botticellis The
Birth of Venus. However, Saville explodes this tradition with her
somewhat vulgar interpretations. Savilles painting is a prime
example of modern art moving away from traditional interpretations
of beauty through the re-invention of the beautiful.
The application of the paint, the use of colour and the composition of
the tile effect contribute to the paintings aesthetic quality, and by
extension, artistic beauty, despite the fact that the subject does not
coincide with societys, or arts, criteria on physical beauty; the skin
is discoloured in parts and the womans figure is uneven and devoid
of sexuality. Saville subverts Etcoffs assertions that beauty in the
twentieth and twenty-first centuries is predominantly associated with
consumerism (as outlined in Survival of the Prettiest: The Science of
Beauty) by creating a beautiful painting, with an ugly subject matter.
+
PROPPED
+
Saville exaggerates and
distorts the female nude, but
she does this by distorting
the angle of view and by
dramatically cropping and
foreshortening the figure,
which emphasises its
physical bulk. She is
fascinated with the body,
particularly by female flesh,
which she describes as ugly,
beautiful, repulsive,
compelling, anxious, neurotic,
dead, alive.
Jenny Saville, Propped, 1992,
oil on canvas, 213.5 x 183cm

+
About the time she painted Propped, Saville was intrigued by
plastic surgery and spent many hours watching surgeons
manipulate flesh.
In her work, she raises contemporary concerns about
expectations of beauty and the female body.
As Susie McKenzie wrote in the Guardian (22nd October
2005), 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.
Art-iculate

+
In Propped, the angle of view is low; as viewers, we are forced
to look up as the figure looks down, sitting uncomfortably on a
tall stool, which is almost hidden by her abundant flesh.
Foreshortening causes her head to look disproportionately
small although her gaze demands an embarrassing level of
intimacy between the model and the viewer.

+
In Savilles painting, however, there is a sensuous quality to her
expressive and
painterly brushwork as it echoes the physical quality of the
flesh. The depiction
of space is unimportant in both artworks.
When observing the figure in Propped, however, there is a
feeling that the intended observer is not necessarily male.
Savilles distorted figure dares the viewer to look at her and
pass judgment on her size and shape. Shes not comfortable
with the bulk of her flesh.
Saville questions the definition of beauty in Propped.