Jenny Saville

Painter Jenny Saville, renowned for her large-scale portraits of fleshy, naked women, made her name soon after leaving art school when her graduation exhibition work was bought by collector Charles Saatchi. In 1997, her work was also part of the landmark Royal Academy show Sensation, alongside now iconic pieces by Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin and others. Since then, the main focus of her work - which has been shown in museums and galleries all around the world - has remained the female form. In 2018, a Jenny Saville painting called Propped sold at auction for £9.5m, at the time a world record for a work by a living female artist. A retrospective exhibition of over 50 of her paintings and drawings is being held at the National Portrait Gallery in London. Jenny Saville tells John Wilson how her childhood interest in painting was nurtured by her uncle, an art teacher, who took her to museums to understand the work of great artists. She says she was hugely inspired by seeing a Lucien Freud exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in London in 1987, and that his large-scale nude portraits influenced her early style. Jenny recalls how a year spent at the University of Cincinnati, as part of her Glasgow School of Art degree course, also had an impact on her understanding of art history from a feminist perspective and refocused the theme of her painting. She describes how she made the monumental paintings of female nude figures, some with liposuction surgery markings on the bodies, which were shown at the Saatchi Gallery and at the Royal Academy Sensation exhibition. Jenny Saville also reflects on the later influence on her work of the Dutch-American abstract painter Willem de Kooning, and of her children with whom she paints at home.

Producer: Edwina Pitman