Jenny Saville
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. 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.
If you own a work by Jenny Saville
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
Write to info@whitebankfineart.co.uk, or start below.
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.