+ 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. Saville’s 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 Saville’s 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, Saville’s interest has been the body in transformation.

+ Culture of the body Saville’s 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 they’re gone.

+ Leah Cross – Freelance Writer “Jenny Saville’s 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 Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus. However, Saville explodes this tradition with her somewhat vulgar interpretations. Saville’s 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 painting’s aesthetic quality, and by extension, artistic beauty, despite the fact that the subject does not coincide with society’s, or art’s, criteria on physical beauty; the skin is discoloured in parts and the woman’s figure is uneven and devoid of sexuality. Saville subverts Etcoff’s 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, 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 Saville’s 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. Saville’s distorted figure dares the viewer to look at her and pass judgment on her size and shape. She’s not comfortable with the bulk of her flesh. Saville questions the definition of beauty in Propped.