Jenny Saville
is a high profile artist. Her paintings are very large in size, her subjects which are usually nude women, often herself, are also huge, massive and bold. Jenny prefers to work from photographs rather than from real models yet the flesh looks so real. Her use of line and composition provides for plenty of movement, illusions and extreme foreshortening. She has been recognized as one of the most thought provoking and technically accomplished talents of her generation.
Many of her paintings confront perceptions of beauty and femininity.
In 1995-96 she did a photographic collaboration series, Closed Contact, with fashion photographer/filmmaker Glen Luchford. This show in particular confronted and challenged conceived notions of feminine beauty. This collusion of the two artists mimicked the collusion of the art and fashion worlds.
After having observed the operations of reconstructive and aesthetic surgery, Saville was eager to express the violence and anesthetized pain of this experience in her own work. The paintings captures the full range of color, tonality and topography of live flesh. Distortions confront and coerce the viewer into an examination of one's own body and ideas of beauty held within.
These images offer a unique experience for the viewer. The discomfort is complicated. It is triggered partly by our sense of what a "normal" female body should look like. In Jenny's painting the body is transformed. It is spread and expanded beyond what is embedded in our minds as beautiful or normal. In a solo show Territories held in 1999, her work again questions societal obsession with an idealized, almost robotic, image of the female form. By portraying these "images of extreme humanness" that are so out of place in an anxious culture obsessed with eternal youth and beauty, Saville confronts the very essence of what it means to have an active mind in a decaying, dying body.
Although her work may be difficult to interpret for viewers, if they pay attention to how the work feels they should not have any trouble unwrapping the meaning and inspiration behind it. Artists have the power and freedom to provide us with images and messages. Jenny Saville is painting images that we do not normally see. Here painting heighten awareness and consciousness. The viewer can not escape the implications of their physical being, they force us into new habits of perception. In this society obsessed with an unrealistic body image, Jenny has made a consistent, credible statement as a contemporary female artist in response.
Resources/Articles:
http://www.gagosian.com/artists/jenny-saville