Jenny Saville

Jenny Saville was born in 1970 in Cambridge, England. She received her B.A. Honors Fine Art from Glasgow School of Art, Scotland before being represented by Gagosian in 1997.

Saville is known for her depictions of the human form, which transcend the boundaries of both classical figuration and modern abstraction. Saville has been credited with originating a new and challenging method of depicting the figure in her work. Captivated by the endless aesthetic and formal possibilities of the materiality of the human body, Jenny Saville makes a highly sensuous and tactile impression of surface and mass in her monumental paintings. Subjects are imbued with a sculptural yet elusive dimensionality that verges on the abstract.

Recent solo museum exhibitions include Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rome (2005); Norton Museum of Art, Florida (2011, travelled to the Museum of Modern Art Oxford, England, through 2012); “Jenny Saville Drawing,” Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, University of Oxford, United Kingdom (2015–16); “Now: Jenny Saville,” Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh (2018); “Jenny Saville.” George Economou Collection, Athens, Greece (2018) “Jenny Saville”. Museo Novecento, Museo Novecento, Museo degli Innocenti and Museo di Casa Buonarroti, Florence, Italy (2021).

Saville’s works are featured in several public collections, including the Tate, London; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Broad, Los Angeles; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; The Morgan Library & Museum, New York; Seattle Art Museum, Seattle; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; and The Long Museum, Shanghai. In 2007 Saville was elected a Royal Academician, Royal Academy of Arts, London.

Source: Gagosian