When I walked into Jenny Saville’s exhibition, The Anatomy of Painting, this morning, my face split into a grin. I didn’t expect to see old friends. Not the familiar faces of my colleagues, but the colossal titans of yesteryear, when I first encountered her work at the original Saatchi Gallery in Boundary Road, St John’s Wood, in 1994. That seminal moment when she opened her wings and let fly had arrived, and the figurative landscape would never be the same again.
That day is etched in my memory like a “you should have been there moment”; the one that leaves you envious of those who were there and lucky enough to know something very important was happening. An old college friend took me. I wasn’t living in London at the time, but we made that trip to see her. I didn’t read the publicity, so I didn’t really know what I was signing up for, but the first indication that something was ‘afoot’ was a couple of New York ladies who arrived in Burberry trench coats and trainers. I was fascinated because, at that time, trainers were strictly to be found on the feet of people doing sports. I’d never seen trainers on the feet of those ‘kinda’ ladies before. They were stick-thin, coiffured “ladies who lunched”. We followed them into this white, cavernous room that sang with a pitch that only a minimal white space can give you. We rounded the corner to find the ladies had fallen in on themselves, clutching each other for support, a thin squeal coming from one, and the other had jammed her knuckles into her mouth to stop herself from screaming. I followed their straitened gaze to the one, two, three, four paintings, pillars of flesh. I let out a celebratory, throaty roar, “WHOA!” This was flesh like I’d never seen it presented before, not in a glossy magazine, not in a butcher’s shop, not in a hospital bed crimped with old age. This was a gaze from a defiant female perspective. After all, she had used her own reflection to write her own history. She’d mapped the typography and landscape of her flesh on a monumental scale not seen before. She’d arrived – and I didn’t even know we were waiting for her. For the ‘last forty years’, Saville says, she’s been making paintings and, over these last 30 years, I’ve paid homage to Saville’s work at the Gagosian, The Oxford Museum of Modern Art, wherever I could get an opportunity to see how next she would render flesh in paint. She says, ‘It’s what oil paint was made for,’ and I can see, in her hands, its mercurial properties defy the eye for the countless combinations she has formulated to see flesh made new.
Today, in the National Portrait Gallery, Saville’s works range from her earliest, Propped 1992, to her latest works, made from 2020 onwards. The later works are painted with hotter hues, rose madder, cadmium red, and magenta. She presents her touchstone portraits of young women, a template or trope to carry the real meat, the gesture. They are fluorescent, perhaps even florid, unlike the body of work she has presented before. The features of heads are regular and plump; they carry neither bloody anguish nor disfigurement. Instead, their perfection is disturbed by ragged sheathes of light, a glitch in the matrix. Sometimes, a cropped but fully imagined image of an eye, mouth, or nose floats on a surface of writhing, oily brushstrokes, some reminiscent of De Kooning, whom Saville cites as a massive influence on her, shaping her work. Maybe this is a nod to him, looser, more dense, more like his palette, perhaps? It feels like Saville is luxuriating in the sensual delight of paint, alternating between a loaded brush, sculpting the gesture, mapping and mark-making with oil sticks and charcoal, transposing time, calligraphic meter, a heartbeat between looking and doing.
Saville is so consummate at her craft that it feels like she’s mapped the surface of the moon in every conceivable way possible: inside out, upside down, seeking the element of surprise, be it a slippery splash, the speed and rhythm of a brushstroke or colliding colour combinations. Saville excavates, pulling back the veil of flesh, blood, bone, and timelines. Time itself is drafted, implausible, quixotic limbs dangling and overlapping, perfectly illustrated in The Mothers (2011), a life-size oil and charcoal portrait of Saville herself, struggling to hang on to one squirming toddler while holding her other babe in her arms. The babe quietly surveys their older sibling and charges us with helping. In my mind, this iconic image of Mother and Child is usually depicted as the beatific, unfazed mother, rendered in oils, commanding all she surveys, her life perfect, her children perfect. What Saville gives us is a reality many mothers can relate to. The frenzied chalk lines mapping and overlapping, grabbing five minutes here, five minutes there. You can see the meter of her life in the struggle to finish one thing before her attention is taken away by child-rearing. It’s a tussle that has been ongoing for female artists for centuries. It is life itself. There’s a curious hole in the toddler’s side. Your brain tells you it’s a hole, maybe this is what’s making him struggle so, but then, looking more closely, it’s a foot, perfectly rendered. But is it realistically possible that it belongs to his younger sibling, pushing him from behind, vying for their mother’s attention? That is the genius of Saville – making us look and look again. This painting is a masterpiece, and if it were an altarpiece, I would surely be on my knees.
Thank you, Jenny Saville, for your unflinching exploration into what it is to be human and a woman.
Jenny Savills: Anatomy of Painting, National Portrait Gallery, 20 June – 7 September 2025