Jenny Saville valuation
Paints the body at enormous scale, in paint as heavy and physical as the flesh it describes.
Jenny Saville was born in Cambridge in 1970 and studied at Glasgow School of Art, where the degree show was bought outright by Charles Saatchi, who then funded eighteen months of painting.
What a work by Jenny Saville is worth
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Bio
Jenny Saville was born in Cambridge in 1970 and studied at Glasgow School of Art, where the degree show was bought outright by Charles Saatchi, who then funded eighteen months of painting. The work that followed is figure painting at a scale and with a frankness that had gone out of fashion: bodies seen from below and foreshortened, flesh compressed against glass, surgical and transitional subjects, painted in thick oil with a handling that owes as much to de Kooning as to Rubens. More recently the drawn and layered charcoal and pastel figures have become an equally significant part of the practice.
The paintings are unique, are often very large, and are heavily worked in oil, so surface and impasto condition are the practical questions along with the sheer logistics of moving them. The drawings — charcoal, pastel and mixed media on paper or canvas, often with earlier lines left visible — are a substantial category in their own right rather than studies for something else. The print output is small. Signature and date are generally on the reverse, and Gagosian and earlier Saatchi provenance is the usual documentary spine.
At a glance
- Born
- 1970, Cambridge
- Movement
- Young British Artists
Jenny Saville's paintings
Propped, of 1992, is the painting that made her name: a self-portrait about seven feet tall, made for her degree show in Glasgow, with words by the philosopher Luce Irigaray written in reverse across the surface. Plan, of 1993, was the signature picture of Young British Artists III at the Saatchi Gallery in 1994. Shift, of 1996 to 1997, has been sold at auction twice. Strategy (South Face/Front Face/North Face) was used on the cover of the Manic Street Preachers' album The Holy Bible in 1994, and Stare, of 2005, on Journal for Plague Lovers in 2009. Fulcrum, of 1998 to 1999, belongs to the Broad Art Foundation and is rarely shown because of its size.
Gagosian has shown her paintings in Territories in New York in 1999, Ancestors in 2018, Elpis in 2020 and Ekkyklema in London in 2023, and the National Portrait Gallery in London gave her The Anatomy of Painting in 2025. A painting's title, date, size and exhibition history are what place it in this sequence, and they belong in any description sent for valuation.
Closed Contact, the photographs with Glen Luchford
The one significant body of editioned work is Closed Contact, made in 1995 and 1996 with the photographer Glen Luchford. Saville pressed her body against a sheet of clear plastic and Luchford photographed it through the plastic, so the flesh flattens and distorts much as it does in her paintings. The results are very large chromogenic prints, mounted in acrylic box frames, in editions of six.
Because the prints are so large and the frame is part of the object, condition is the main question: scratches or clouding in the acrylic, lifting at the edges of the mount and fading of the colour are all hard or impossible to correct. Each print should come with its edition number and documentation from the gallery that first sold it, and those papers matter as much here as they do for the paintings.
Best auction results
- Propped £9.5m
- Oil on canvas, 1992 · London · 5 October 2018
- Publicly reported
- At the time the highest auction price for a work by a living woman.
- Shift $10.9m
- Oil on canvas, 1996 to 1997 · New York · 16 November 2023
- Publicly reported
- Shift £6.8m
- Oil on canvas, 1996 to 1997 · London · 28 June 2016
- Publicly reported
- The same painting, on its first appearance at auction.
Results as reported at the time of sale, inclusive of buyer's premium. They are a record of what specific works achieved on specific days, not a guide to what any other work is worth.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
