Jenny Saville

In a society often obsessed with physical appearance, Jenny Saville has created a niche for overweight women in contemporary visual culture. Known primarily for her large-scale paintings of obese women, Saville has recently broken into the contemporary art world with the help of gallery owner and art collector Charles Saatchi. Rising quickly to great critical and public recognition in part through Saatchi’s patronage, Saville has been heralded for creating conceptual art through the use of figure painting.

Saville was born into a family of educators in Cambridge, England, in 1970. She began a course of study at the Glasgow School of Art in Scotland in 1988. There, she found only one female painting tutor - a disappointing lack of female perspective for the budding feminist. This lack of a female presence was soon filled through the feminist texts that Saville began reading during a visit to the United States midway through her college career. Saville was awarded a scholarship to attend Cincinnati University for six months. The college was located in Ohio, where Saville’s lifelong fascination with the workings of the human body began to affect her artwork. Finding herself immersed in a different culture, Saville “was interested in the malls, where you saw lots of big women. Big white flesh in shorts and T-shirts.” It was good to see because they had the physicality that I was interested in.” It was in this environment that Saville began to read the feminist literature that would later play an important role in paintings such as Propped. With these texts and other artists such as Cindy Sherman (a photographer) as an influence, Saville embarked on creating a series of works that would later make up her degree show in Glasgow.

The controversial 1997 “Sensation” exhibit, which showed at the Royal Academy of Art in London, furthered Saville’s notoriety. “Sensation” included fellow Young British Artists Damien Hirst, Gary Hume, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Marcus Harvey, Tracey Emin, and Chris Ofili, among others. The show opened to mixed reviews and throughout its run caused quite an uproar, inciting more than one occurrence of vandalism of the artwork. Fortunately, Saville’s work survived unscathed and was also featured in the equally uproarious New York showing of the exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, which Mayor Rudy Guiliani openly protested. Saville’s gigantic paintings dominated the show in sheer size, thus making her a household name in London and her work recognizable in popular British culture.