Jenny Saville is enjoying her first institutional show in the U.K. under the NPG’s new steward, the erudite Victoria Siddell, who replaced Nicholas Cullen. Dr Cullien has tapped in and bussed up the road to The British Museum to add some special sauce and help steer into calmer waters.
Exhibitions at the NPG don’t come together overnight; in fact, we collectively learned via Sarah Howgate, the curator, that what we were experiencing was 2555 days in the making or 7 years.
A long time to itch, get loans & make a solid plan. This plan-shaped acorn has grown into a tree-shaped show that the public can finally scratch, and if you are 25 years young and under, it’s free, thanks to a patron with plenty of sheets, at the request of the artist.
Scratching is certainly an undercurrent of this stellar gathering of 45 works spanning 30 years. The scratching seems to work both ways. Jenny Saville often likes a textured, topographic surface, especially in later works, where the more free-associative colour-centric brushstroking occurs. In the other direction, the audience might need to scratch their heads throughout in contemplation. Her work gives viewers a lot of room to feel a lot without being terrorised with one message or even understanding what the message might be. This increasingly becomes the theme as we journey through her “Anatomy of Painting”. The title of the show is perhaps the most direct attempt to explain what Saville is about & that she isn’t abating in her intent but advancing. She hasn’t been afraid to wear her influences on her sleeve. At 21, she seemed to consume a diet of Freud, Bacon, & Porridge. This led to the image that launched a thousand Saatchi ships & the rest is blue chip history.
This painting in question shares a Freudian palette, favouring a Naples yellow to add luminosity throughout, but really, the comparison with Freud should be kept to a minimum. She always had her distinct own voice, choosing to depict herself at the most exaggerated of angles to make a statement of feminist intent, an intent to clearly say, “This is how I am, deal with it”
This early work, which was grounded in muted colours showing bodies with a Reubens esq appreciation of volume and mass. It asked for more stillness and didn’t ever raise its voice, but as we move through gallery spaces and witness the later 90’s output, we can see this voice amplified & marinated in chaos and violence. This new approach witnesses a period where she found the greatest success in balancing her interest in abstract expression with her foundation in figuration. The work greatly benefits from this cocktail. As time has gone on, she has continued to be a visual mixologist, trying out different recipes with varying degrees of success, if we compare the impact of the physical experience of the work from this period, to more recent works, which perhaps don’t advance the conversation as much as her “Manic Street Preacher” period, so to speak.
The NPG isn’t blessed with the kind of breathing space a Saville work is usually allowed. This species can usually be found, naturally, nestled in the broad plains of a Gagosian outpost or quietly gaining value in private collections. Whereas this gaggle of specisimin does suffer from not having its usual breathing space, with not much wall space left to identify as wall space around them
The most striking thing about her overall is the use of scale. It never feels performative. They all seem perfectly sized to suit the emotion she is trying to elicit, to represent how big it feels inside to cry, feel pain, bleed, and fear. A genuine investigator of the real human experience.
Some viewers might not be happy in every direction she has travelled in & has no difficult working things out on the canvas and not letting her brushstrokes be premeditated, rigid or only serving the goal of absolute realism, a concept she continually challenges.
Alan Yentob gave his last ten minutes on camera to Jenny Saville’s first interview in 25 years on the eve of this show. In this short segment, we learnt more about her process than her purpose. Alan Yentobs final remark was to seek confirmation that her portrayal of women is designed to take us somewhere, a destination that no other painter has done before her. She was reluctant to agree. It wasn’t suprising. Jenny Saville believes in the power of painting sufficiently to let it do its own explanations, that’s not her job. This important body of work and presentation of her visual language’s evolution will next move to Fort Worth, so be on alarm Texans
Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting, 20th June – 7th September 2025 National Portrait Gallery, London
Tickets: £21, concessions available Members go free – Visitors aged 25 and under can book a free exhibition ticket at HERE
The exhibition publication, Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting (Hardback £35), can be pre-ordered HERE
About the artist
Jenny Saville was born in 1970 in Cambridge, England. She received her B.A. Honors Fine Art from Glasgow School of Art, Scotland before being represented by Gagosian in 1997.
Saville is known for her depictions of the human form, which transcend the boundaries of both classical figuration and modern abstraction. Saville has been credited with originating a new and challenging method of depicting the figure in her work. Captivated by the endless aesthetic and formal possibilities of the materiality of the human body, Jenny Saville makes a highly sensuous and tactile impression of surface and mass in her monumental paintings. Subjects are imbued with a sculptural yet elusive dimensionality that verges on the abstract.
Recent solo museum exhibitions include Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rome (2005); Norton Museum of Art, Florida (2011, travelled to the Museum of Modern Art Oxford, England, through 2012); “Jenny Saville Drawing,” Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, University of Oxford, United Kingdom (2015–16); “Now: Jenny Saville,” Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh (2018); “Jenny Saville.” George Economou Collection, Athens, Greece (2018) “Jenny Saville”. Museo Novecento, Museo Novecento, Museo degli Innocenti and Museo di Casa Buonarroti, Florence, Italy (2021).
Saville’s works are featured in several public collections, including the Tate, London; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Broad, Los Angeles; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; The Morgan Library & Museum, New York; Seattle Art Museum, Seattle; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; and The Long Museum, Shanghai. In 2007 Saville was elected a Royal Academician, Royal Academy of Arts, London.
