Bluestocking Oxford

By Ruby Tipple

Jenny Saville’s new exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, ‘Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting’, is immediately confrontational. From the first room, flesh is the feminist subject. The ripple of skin on skin; fat, flabby stomachs; sagging breasts; pus-filled spots and blemishes; squashed and bleeding faces – all are painted in riotous colour on a physically demanding ambitious scale. The oil paint she uses is textured and strong. Despite the artist’s protestations that her works are politically neutral, they’re nude paintings which scream their still-pertinent messages: of reclamation of the female body – even when it fails to conform to the normal standard of beauty.

She has been revered in the art world since her first show in 1992 – a final degree showcase at the Glasgow School of Art. Even as a student, one of the works exhibited in this showcase immediately gained national press coverage: her self-portrait Propped (1992). It not only captured the attention and subsequent artistic support of infamous art dealer Charles Saatchi, but also, in 2018, the painting broke the auction record for a living female artist when it sold at Sotheby’s, London for £9,500,000. 

It continues to impress with its boldness. Saville’s contorted thighs twisted around a metal stool; her hands gripping the purple flesh. Her face is barely visible – upturned and semi-obscured – all while an inscription from French feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray’s 1980 essay When Our Lips Speak Together swirls over her skin. It reads as follows: “if we continue to speak in this sameness – speak as men have spoken for centuries, we will fail each other.” It’s a symbolic painting which outlines why the female nude is such a prominent subject of artistic reclamation within her work. Saville’s paintings intend to illustrate this new approach to figure painting – a reversal of centuries of art featuring women as objects, trading agency for idealised beauty.

Her paintings since this first 1992 show have continued to generate both acclaim and revulsion. A painting of hers (Stare, 2004-2005) was used for the cover of Manic Street Preachers’ ninth album ‘Journal For Plague Lovers’. Moving away from her traditionally female subjects, it features the face of a glassy-eyed boy, splattered in blood against a background of whitish blue. It was deemed so controversial, with its suggestions of violence against a child, that it was censored by four major UK supermarkets and sold in plain slipcases instead.

The 2015 exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford ‘Titian to Canaletto: Drawing in Venice’ featured a new collection of Saville’s works which challenged the reputational imperviousness of Renaissance portraiture. The works – some of which are exhibited in her new 2025 show – respond to art’s historic lack of female agency in a thoughtful way. Classic drawings of the Madonna and child, or Rembrandt’s pen-and-ink drawings of mothers and their children are made more expressive in Saville’s hands. Much more focus is placed on the bodily changes of pregnancy – a mother’s distended, fleshy belly,  on top of which sit wriggling children. 

This collection of work is Saville’s most obvious response to Luce Irigaray’s instructions scratched on the canvas of Propped: breaking from the language of sameness, to find a new way of speaking. This mission is not just written on her skin, but it is evidently her lifeblood – cementing her status as one of Britain’s boldest contemporary artists working today.

Yet ‘The Anatomy of Painting’ is Saville’s first major London exhibition. Compared to other temporary exhibitions in London galleries, it is small. The Tate Gallery only has one of her early paintings in its collection: Trace (1993-1994). For all her praise, she has too-often been called the ‘female Lucian Freud’ by critics – a popular label placed almost unthinkingly upon her work, considering the striking differences of colour and subject between the two artists.

The current exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, therefore, is a new opportunity for Saville’s work to achieve an even wider audience – one made even more meaningful through the actions of a private donor funding all under 25s to see the exhibition for free. Yet, for all its high points, it is far from a perfect exhibition.

One of the highlights of the exhibition is Witness (2009). A woman’s face is thrown back, jaw smashed beyond recognition into a blur of colour. The erratic streaks of red and pink blood stand out against the white walls of the gallery. Its scale is momentous and gives sickening levels of life to its dying subject.

It is a work which shows a rich knowledge of 20th-century art history, like the raw, agitated diptychs of Francis Bacon, yet takes a new approach in giving more authenticity and life to her subjects. It, too, is a painting which is a culmination of a career-long fascination with flesh and disfiguration – influenced by crime scene photographs, as well as her influential 1994 shadowing of a New York plastic surgeon whilst on a travel fellowship. It is raw power, and Saville at her best. 

When seen alongside her other works from the 1990s and 2000s in the National Portrait Gallery, her visceral and sometimes gory work comes together here to form a strangely beautiful impression. So much of her work focuses on surgical modification, bloodied scars, and imperfection, yet her technique and brushstrokes are unflinchingly vivid for the viewer, shedding light on the unpalatable bits that are often unseen. Walking through these first rooms (the exhibition is in chronological order), there is a chilling sense of fragility created by her images – life at its most precarious, in full display.

Her later works, though, fail to capture that same depth of feeling. Chasah (2020) and Virtual (2020), are more technically perfect, but they lack urgency. Meaty globs of bloodied paint are replaced with ribbons of golden colour: the oil paint linework is precise and deftly blended together. Lipstick pink and neon yellow stand out in these works. They are pleasant, agreeable, media-friendly – everything that Saville had previously torn apart with her work, scratching wildly against the earth to rid herself of it. 

These newer sets of work are responses to a fracturing age of digitised identity and reality, and naturally, Saville’s work was always going to develop and evolve away from the bodily emphasis of her work in the 1990s and 2000s. But people-pleasers rarely make good art, and centering her new art around online hyper-perfection has led to Saville sacrificing the best quality of her artwork: its obstinate urgency; its hugeness – how it can grab you and make you realise just how unattractive and alive we can all be.

 Shows like ‘Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting’ are far too often in isolation – used as evidence that female painters now have the exact same access to opportunity as their male counterparts. No individual exhibition or painter will ever be perfect enough to fix this continued, gendered imbalance on their own – despite the influx of five-star reviews from the media, emphasising it as ‘the exhibition of the summer’. 

True change, instead, comes from normalising female painters as ordinary and equal contributors to the art world, rather than holding women to a dangerous and unattainable standard as sole representatives of their sex. Saville’s new exhibition is in danger of being placed against this unattainable ideal.

It is a great collection of art overall, but don’t expect it to be perfect. All of Saville’s work warns against it. She is not the feminist Messiah. See her for the rawness and humanity of her art instead, and you will see it as it’s intended to be appreciated.

Acknowledgements

Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting runs at the National Portrait Gallery, London from June 20 to September 7 https://www.npg.org.uk/whatson/exhibitions/2025/jenny-saville/

All artwork by Jenny Saville

All images by Ruby Tipple, unless stated otherwise