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Jenny Saville

born 1970

Trace 1993–4
© Jenny Saville, courtesy the artist
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Biography

Jennifer Anne Saville (born 7 May 1970) is a contemporary British painter and an original member of the Young British Artists.

Saville works and lives in Oxford, England and she is known for her large-scale painted depictions of nude women. Saville has been credited with originating a new and challenging method of painting the female nude and reinventing figure painting for contemporary art. Some paintings are of small dimensions, while other are of much larger scale. Monumental subjects come from pathology textbooks that she has studied that informed her on injury to bruise, burns, and deformity. John Gray commented: "As I see it, Jenny Saville's work expresses a parallel project of reclaiming the body from personality. Saville worked with many models who underwent cosmetic surgery to reshape a portion of their body. In doing that, she captures "marks of personality for the flesh" and together embraces how we can be the writers of our own lives."

She is one of two women to have made the top 10 auction lots sold in 2023.

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    Jenny Saville
    1993–4
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