Jenny Saville: A Talent That Transcends Time

At London’s National Portrait Gallery, a retrospective spanning decades reveals a profound exploration of the body and an ongoing dialogue with western art history

BY Lou Selfridge in Exhibition Reviews | 27 JUN 25

A gunshot wound to the face is often – though not always – fatal. Sometimes, the bullet exits at just the right spot, and although the trauma is immense, the victim survives. Not so in Witness (2009), a 2.7 metre-tall painting of a head by Jenny Saville, currently on view in the artist’s survey at the National Portrait Gallery in London. Painted from a crime scene photograph, the subject – lying flat, eyes shut, mouth destroyed – is, quite evidently, dead. It’s a graphic, violent work. As I was writing this, a colleague walked past my desk, saw the image open on my laptop screen, and simply said, ‘Gross’. But when you see the painting in person – its scale so much larger than life – the violence is abstracted. Standing in front of Witness, what you notice are the sweeping strokes of oil paint – the sensual way the pigment is pushed across the canvas. The mess of blood and tissue around the subject’s exploded mouth, rendered in frenzied strokes, looks more like an abstract expressionist painting by Willem de Kooning than the forensic snapshot it ostensibly depicts. 

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Jenny Saville, Reverse, 2002–3, oil on canvas, 2.1 × 2.4 m. Courtesy: © Jenny Saville and Gagosian

Significant space in ‘The Anatomy of Painting’ is dedicated to this and other large-scale oil paintings of heads, many of which evidence Saville’s fascination with the unusual and macabre. Three works in the exhibition are based on an image Saville found in a medical textbook, depicting a girl with a distinctive birthmark on her face (Stare, 2004–5; Red Stare Head IV, 2006–11; Red Stare Head II, 2007–11). Patches of the face in Figure 11.23 (1996–7) are painted a sharp, bloody crimson – as if the skin has been burned off in a terrible accident. One of Saville’s self-portraits from this period seems tinged with the spectre of death: in Reverse (2002–3), the artist lies sideways on the floor, her eyes open and glaring – but somehow empty. She looks like the glassy-eyed victim of a road traffic collision, waiting for either a paramedic or death to relieve her suffering. 

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Jenny Saville, Aleppo, 2017–8, pastel and charcoal on canvas, 2 × 1.6 m. Courtesy: © Jenny Saville and National Galleries of Scotland

Still, not everything on display is pervaded by doom and gloom. There’s a vitality in several self-portraits of the artist with her children – charcoal and rose chalk drawings that reimagine the Christian tradition of ‘Virgin and Child’ art. Saville is consciously referencing iconic works in the genre by artists including Leonardo da Vinci, Caravaggio and, most notably, Michelangelo – a link made explicit in the title of her 2011 Study for Pentimenti IV (after Michelangelo’s Virgin and Child). Yet, unlike these biblical depictions, Saville’s pitch-perfect riffs on Christian iconography capture the realities of motherhood in the 21st century. In one sketch, Mother and Child Study II (2009), Saville holds her child with one hand while wielding a crayon in the other. Producing art while caring for children is no mean feat – and in these art-historically inflected works, Saville presents a more realistic image of the challenges of motherhood. 

Saville disarms the voguish peculiarities of taste by being so talented that nothing but the paint in front of you seems to matter

Religious imagery is a throughline in much of Saville’s recent work. Alongside these mother-and-child works are several paintings that repurpose the iconography of the Pietà – in which the Virgin Mary holds the lifeless body of Christ after the crucifixion. Here, however, Saville replaces the religious scene with something contemporary: in one painting, a headless figure holds the bodies of several dead children, victims of the conflict in Syria (Aleppo, 2017–18). There’s a subversion in twisting Christian iconography in this way, but her message aligns with the New Testament narrative: Mary would have embraced all our children as her own. Saville’s Aleppo is a reminder that all humans – Christian or otherwise – should feel the pain and outrage of these deaths. 

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Jenny Saville, Ruben’s Flap, 1998–9, oil on canvas, 3 × 2.4 m. Courtesy: © Jenny Saville, The George Economou Collection and Gagosian 

This exhibition features several large-scale paintings of naked women that brought the artist acclaim straight out of her BFA at the Glasgow School of Art in the early 1990s. Rather than objectifying the female form, in works like Ruben’s Flap (1998–9), Saville captures the fleshy, imperfect beauty of human bodies; revisiting these paintings is a reminder of just how radical it is within the long canon of figurative art, to see women’s bodies portrayed by women themselves. Meanwhile, the most recent painting in the exhibition, Eve, was completed in 2023. It is one of several works depicting young, dewy-faced women, their faces embellished with swirls and splashes of rainbow-hued paint. From afar, these paintings seem oddly naïve, the garish palette of Saville’s abstract marks feeling unnecessarily decorative. However, something seems to change when standing just a few feet away: her lush handling of paint overwhelms any initial scepticism, the sweeping strokes of pigment pulled off with the captivating yet controlled energy typical of Francis Bacon. This is what good art can do. Saville disarms the voguish peculiarities of taste by being so talented that nothing but the paint in front of you seems to matter. 

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Jenny Saville, Chasah, 2020, oil on linen, 2 × 1.6 m. Courtesy: © Jenny Saville and Gagosian

Jenny Saville is that rare thing: a painter who is unable to make an uninteresting or unoriginal mark. To stand before one of her works is to see flashes of art history – present and alive in each brushstroke. 

‘Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting’ is on view at the National Portrait Gallery, London, until 7 September

Main image: Jenny Saville, Hyphen (detail), 1999, oil on canvas, 2.7 × 3.7 m. Courtesy: © Jenny Saville and Gagosian 

Lou Selfridge is a writer and assistant editor of frieze. They live in London, UK.

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