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24 Facts About Jenny Saville

1.

Jenny Saville has been credited with originating a new and challenging method of painting the female nude and reinventing figure painting for contemporary art.

2.

Jenny Saville worked with many models who underwent cosmetic surgery to reshape a portion of their body.

3.

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

4.

Jenny Saville went to the Lilley and Stone School in Newark, Nottinghamshire, for her secondary education, later gaining her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at Glasgow School of Art.

5.

Jenny Saville was then awarded a six-month scholarship to the University of Cincinnati where she enrolled in a course in women's studies.

6.

Jenny Saville was exposed to gender political ideas and renowned feminist writers.

7.

Jenny Saville offered the artist an 18-month contract, supporting her while she created new works to be exhibited in the Saatchi Gallery in London.

8.

Since her debut in 1992, Jenny Saville's focus has remained on the female body.

9.

Jenny Saville's published sketches and documents include surgical photographs of liposuction, trauma victims, deformity correction, disease states and transgender patients.

10.

Jenny Saville's paintings are usually much larger than life-size, usually six-by-six feet or more.

11.

In 1994, Jenny Saville's painting Strategy appeared on the cover of Manic Street Preachers' third album The Holy Bible.

12.

Jenny Saville's painting Stare was used for the cover of the band's 2009 album Journal for Plague Lovers.

13.

Jenny Saville wanted to use someone with Luchford's high fashion background to capture her interpretations of the female form.

14.

Jenny Saville's art focuses on women's bodies as the predominant subject matter, and is a far cry away from other works of the female form, which have traditionally objectified women.

15.

Jenny Saville is more interested in the raw and unaltered female form, and the valuable reactions of disgust which are generated when viewing her pieces.

16.

Jenny Saville's work was included in the 2022 exhibition Women Painting Women at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.

17.

Jenny Saville's technique uses small brushstrokes to build up the painting and soften the imaging.

18.

Jenny Saville uses interesting, muted colour combinations for her art pieces that create a soft atmosphere free of harshness with an intense subject and meaning behind it.

19.

Jenny Saville is known for her use of massive canvases that allow the viewer to see the details and layering of oil paints to create her signature aesthetic of movement and abstract realism.

20.

Meagher writes that Jenny Saville sees standards of "beauty and pleasure [as] deeply embedded within Western [culture]", yet, she constantly tries to challenge these assumptions of the body and beauty.

21.

Jenny Saville's subject, non-idealized bodies, have been understood as superposition of mental and emotional mindsets: "if we could see through our skins our psychological injuries, then the process will be clear: every injury and excess is hiding from the surface it goes to our inner body ".

22.

Jenny Saville borrows conventions from a long tradition in figure painting, whether in poses borrowed from Madonna and Child paintings by Leonardo da Vinci, the use of a colour palette reminiscent of Peter Paul Rubens, or the gestural painting of Willem de Kooning in his Woman series.

23.

Jenny Saville appropriates these techniques associated with male masters to show her own point of view as a woman.

24.

In 2004, Jenny Saville explored the idea of floating gender in her work Passage.