Fleshy Female Figures
Jenny Saville and the tension between figuration and abstraction
If there’s one show I wish I had seen in 2022 it’s Jenny Saville’s exhibition of new work at Gagosian in Paris. The show was called Latent and brought together paintings which for her raise questions about what is hidden or concealed from us.
Saville is one of Britain’s leading contemporary painters and is probably best known for her large-scale oil paintings of palpably fleshy female figures. Back in the 1990s she was associated with the group of artists known as the YBAs, and her early work was championed by the collector Charles Saatchi. If you’re not familiar with Saville’s work and need some introduction, she discusses her influences and the ideas that inform her work in this great podcast interview in 2020.
One of the things I find interesting about Saville’s work is that she straddles figuration and abstraction. She paints what we recognise as the human body, but she starts from the abstract and builds out from that. She describes it in terms of ‘laying down a problem’, destroying and rebuilding, until something that doesn’t at first make sense starts to make sense. For her there’s a fight in that process of creation, a tension between the abstract and the figurative. Saville describes her work as an investigation into what reality is, and…
