Jenny Saville: ‘I started to think about not just the anatomy of the body, but about the anatomy of a painting’

The artist Jenny Saville once described paint as ‘tins of liquid flesh’. The statement echoed one made by the Abstract Expressionist painter Willem de Kooning some 50 years previously, when he said that flesh was the reason ‘oil paint was invented’.

Between 1950 and 1953, de Kooning produced a shocking series of paintings known as ‘the Women’. Executed in a wild, fragmentary style, the pictures had a kind of feral quality — art critic Clement Greenberg referred to them as ‘savage dissections’. Furious brushmarks in yellows, pinks and greens challenged the idea of the female body as being a thing of beauty and perfection.

Saville saw de Kooning’s paintings in 1991 and was struck by the artist’s ability to convey the essence of a human form in abstraction. The following year, Saville responded with Propped, a colossal nude painted from below, which exaggerated the body’s proportions to an almost abstract degree. With its mottled skin, rippling thighs and pendulous breasts, the nude was a brazen celebration of female flesh in all its bruised and swollen glory.

Emerging at a time of third-wave feminism, with its focus on body positivity, Saville’s painting brought the debate up close and personal (it was her body in the picture). Here was a woman confidently scrutinising herself with the brutality of Francis Bacon. Written across the surface of the canvas were lines from Luce Irigaray’s feminist text This Sex Which Is Not One, which challenged Western ideas of female sexuality.

The Times put Propped on the front cover of its Saturday supplement, where the art collector and advertising guru Charles Saatchi saw it. He commissioned the 22-year-old Saville to create a series of paintings for his gallery on Boundary Road in London — and the rest, as they say, is history.

Propped is featured in Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting, the artist’s current retrospective at London’s National Portrait Gallery. Featuring 45 paintings and charcoal drawings, from the early 1990s to the present day, the exhibition seeks to situate Saville in the history of figurative art and show how she has reinvented the genre for the 21st century.

Over the years, Saville has been candid about her wide-ranging influences, which encompass the Italian Renaissance, Abstract Expressionism and London’s Camden School. Her discovery of Lucian Freud’s paintings at the Hayward Gallery in 1988, just before she began her degree at the Glasgow School of Art, got her thinking about the exterior and interior of the human form. Freud saw flesh as an outer surface that needed to be penetrated to expose the psychological truth within.

In 1994, Saville watched a plastic surgeon perform an operation, detaching a woman’s face and pulling it upwards. The experience was a revelation; she realised that skin was a movable mass. In an interview with the National Portrait Gallery curator Sarah Howgate, she says, ‘I discovered that surgeons would move flesh around the body to rebuild it.’

In response, she painted Ruben’s Flap (1998-99), which referenced a technique of taking fat from a woman’s thigh to use in breast reconstruction. ‘Witnessing a surgeon cutting into flesh makes you see how layered flesh is, how vulnerable and easy it is to penetrate,’ she says. ‘I started to think about not just the anatomy of the body, but about the anatomy of a painting: the layering, the pace and tempo of the painted surface.’

Paint, Saville reasoned, layers the canvas like flesh envelops a skeleton. It is an endlessly malleable presence waiting to be explored. The artist collaged images of women’s bodies into terrific mountains of creamy matter, their huge force temporarily stilled by the canvas.

‘Painting from photographs frees up time to think about the way I’m applying paint,’ she explains to Howgate. ‘The mark-making, paint consistency and colour. It enables me to play with the fundamentals of painting.’

By the late 1990s, Saville was squeezing and entwining bodies into tumultuous corporeal landscapes. Her 1999 exhibition at the Gagosian gallery in New York, titled Territories, depicted nude women crammed into the picture space so that they appeared like a mass of bloated, puckered flesh. The artist had taken nature’s tonal range up a notch, incorporating a range of colours — from whites to cool blues and natural tones — to give a sense of the landscape of the body.

Since then, Saville has continued to push the boundaries between figuration and abstraction, tracking the terrain like a cartographer analysing horizontal and vertical mass. ‘I never was interested in how to make a good painting,’ she says. ‘I didn’t work on it with the idea of perfection, but to see how far one could go.’

Saville’s career could be seen as a long argument with herself about different ways to make a painting. Through abstraction, figuration, gesture and process, the artist presents the viewer with an in-depth portrait of painting, a powerful study of this most viscous of mediums.

Christie’s is delighted to support Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting at the National Portrait Gallery, London, open until 7 September 2025