Portrait of Saville by Nigel Parry.Jenny Saville is an english painter known for her large-scale canvases of nude women. She started depicting the fleshy female nude including alot of self-portraiture. She addresses a history of painting where "women have usually only taken the role of model. I'm both, artist and model." (Davies) In depicting herself (nude body), Saville is like body artists, her artwork is herself/own body and in the reflexive gesture she breaks the objectification of the body.
In Saville's paintings bodies are so close that the skin is pushed to identify with the surface of the canvas. This is further emphasised by her use of paint, exploiting its materiality, so thick and fleshy that it becomes like meat. The canvas becomes the body.
"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." (Davies)
The overwhelming fat of her subjects 'leaks' over the limit of the painting, like expanisve meat growing out of control. "I'm painting women who've been made to think they're big and disgusting, who imagine that their thighs go on forever. (...) I do have this sense with female flesh that things are leaking out. Alot of our flesh is blue, like butcher's meat." (Davies) This comparison between human flesh and meat becomes more apparent in Saville's interest in depicting dead animals.
In Saville's paintings bodies are so close that the skin is pushed to identify with the surface of the canvas. This is further emphasised by her use of paint, exploiting its materiality, so thick and fleshy that it becomes like meat. The canvas becomes the body.
"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." (Davies)
The overwhelming fat of her subjects 'leaks' over the limit of the painting, like expanisve meat growing out of control. "I'm painting women who've been made to think they're big and disgusting, who imagine that their thighs go on forever. (...) I do have this sense with female flesh that things are leaking out. Alot of our flesh is blue, like butcher's meat." (Davies) This comparison between human flesh and meat becomes more apparent in Saville's interest in depicting dead animals.
Torso 2, 2004-5
Host, 2000
In her study of the body as meat, Jenny also acknowledges the gendered meanings inscribed in it, portraying transexual subjects. In Matrix a transsexual body exceeds the table it lies on, it feels like meat on the butcher's table, or is it meat in the operating table waiting for gender reassignment surgery?
Matrix, 1999
Saville addresses surgery more bluntly in her portraits of post-surgery patients, taken from medical books. She looks at cosmetic surgery, but how different is cosmetic from sex-change or any kind of surgery? Surgery is the perfect theme for her practice since it 'meatifies' the body and that is precisely what Jenny Saville enacts, that perverse objectification in such a blunt and raw way that it forces a critical reflexion.
Reverse, 2002-3
Reference: Davies, Hunter, Interview: This is Jenny, and this is her Plan: Men paint female beauty in stereotypes; Jenny Saville paints it the way it is. And Charles Saatchi is paying her to keep doing it, independent.co.uk, Tuesday, 1st March 1994.
