British artist Jenny Saville became famous for paintings that render female flesh on a monumental scale. Her canvases, often larger than 6 by 6 feet, magnify the raw details of embodied experience: large, drooping breasts; pregnant bellies and flab; faces smashed against plexiglass, a figure sitting on the toilet.
She once told The Guardian that even as a child, a piano teacher’s body had entranced her: “I was fascinated by the way her two breasts would become one, the way her fat moved, the way it hung on the back of her arms,” she said.
“Vulnerability of the body and the invention of the figure in a contemporary manner.” Watching plastic surgeons cut up a body—and then dealing with the subject matter artistically—offered her a very modern way to think about anatomy.
Imperfections of the body are revealed and are highlighted by expressive strokes, displaying flab, cellulite and veins of the fleshy body.Grabbing her skin with her left hand, her hands seem large compared to her minuscule head in the painting and so you’re first drawn to her seizable body, especially the breasts. Written on her are words such as, ‘delicate’, ‘irrational’, ‘decorative’ and ‘petite’. The words contrast with the body in the painting showing the difference between a ‘real’ woman’s body and the social expectations of what a woman should look like.
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