Jenny Saville

Jenny Saville, a British artist born in 1970 is known for her portraits of overweight individuals, mostly women, focusing on and exaggerating fat and using color and texture to  portray wounds or injuries. Saville’s attention to flesh is seemingly an obsession as she regards time spent observing a plastic surgeon work with flesh as formative for her career. While her work largely references classical sculptures and portraits of women, she certainly takes a modern approach in her depiction disregarding taboos concerning weight and skin disorders or deformities. The image above of Saville’s 2019 Self-Portrait, is rather unnerving. Her depiction of herself is rather sickly and cold, she looks as though she is in distress. Her eyes are glassy and it looks as though there are holes in her cheeks suggesting some sort of decay. Saville’s work is disturbingly confrontational, so much so that I personally found much of her work hard to look at. I appreciate her commitment to showcase such physical attributes as they are not often given as much attention, however, it almost feels as though she fetishizes such attributes.