Exhibition Notes - Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting
- suzannenicholl
- 18 hours ago
- 4 min read
August 2025 National Portrait Gallery London
Exhibition Notes are my way of recording and reflecting on exhibitions I've visited. They aren't polished by any means, but act as an aide-memoire, with photographs and comments, as well as links to the best rabbit holes I've enjoyed exploring. Now grab a cuppa, sit back and be inspired by the fabulously talented Jenny Saville.
Rubin's Flap refers to a surgical breast reconstruction technique.
Visions of the Self - Jenny Saville on Rembrandt
*I'm interested in the transparency, revealing under layers. A cafle of lines give energy and movement.
Over nine feet high, and made in charcoal and pastel on raw canvas, the large drawing pictured was installed in the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo adjacent to Michelangelo’s unfinished marble sculpture Pietà (c. 1547–55), offering a revelatory encounter between the contemporary and the historical. - Gagosian
"The final room of the exhibition is full of colour. The heads on display here are fashioned in reds and blues, yellows and greens. Before the pandemic, Saville went to Moscow, and, while there, she “kept seeing these fascinating faces”. The outcome was that she hired a photographic studio and began taking lots of pictures. In the studio, she found a variety of coloured backdrops, so she began working for the first time with a red background...... I’ve also used a lot of oil bars, and they come in this amazing range of bright tones and hues. I’ve got this big range of sticks in front of me, like big lipsticks. They’re creamy and you can move them in and out of tonal paint and build them up like tapestries.” Studio International
'The final work on display is Eve (2022-23), in which Saville experiments with allowing drips of yellow paint to run down the canvas, over the open eyes, mingling like sweat and tears. But what strikes me most about this work is the burden of titling something Eve.' Studio International
'These recent works are also much influenced by digital technology. Latent (2020-22), for example, references “latent space”, a concept in artificial intelligence that refers to the analysis of hidden structural similarities between visual data.' Studio International
Looking back before I moved on to view the Portrait Award 2025
I loved the winner...
And this would be the painting that touched me the most.
And this made me smile!
Take aways for me on Jenny Saville
Dialogue with Art History – Saville draws heavily on Renaissance and classical masters, constantly re-examining how the human body has been depicted.
Obsession with Flesh – She is inspired by the texture, weight, and imperfection of flesh, seeing it as endlessly expressive and central to human identity.
Bodies as Carriers of History – Her figures embody lived experience—violence, vulnerability, resilience—rather than idealised forms.
Photographic Sources – She works from photographs not life - more truthful.
“I am a scavenger of images. I take photographs on my iPhone of everything: stains, shadows, beautiful light, tyre marks on the road, chewing gum stuck to the pavement, all sorts of things.” Tatler Asia
Her inspiration is broad and often from mundane or incidental things; she gathers visual material from everywhere to feed into her imaginative palette.
“The art I like concentrates on the body – artists who get to the flesh. Visceral artists – Bacon, Freud. And de Kooning, of course. He’s really my man. He doesn’t depict anything, yet it’s more than representation, it’s about the meaning of existence and pushing the medium of paint.” Christie's
Some key influences (Bacon, Freud, de Kooning); interested not just in representation
Layering – her paintings build up in dense, layered surfaces, with marks, smears and scrapes that leave visible traces of process. Charcoal, transparency, colour.
Controlled Accidents – She allows paint to surprise her—drips, smudges, and unintended effects often become integral to the final work. Starting with the abstract she builds the figurative, holding onto areas of the initial painting.
Scale as Impact – Monumental scale is central: it immerses the viewer, makes the body confronting, and conveys the importance/seriousness with which the artist wishes to be taken
Studio Inspiration – Her environment, from collected images to unfinished canvases and incidental marks, is a key source of ideas.
Radio - This Cultural Life
Love this lecture and the connection with Cy Twombly. Want to explore De Kooning more.
If you made it this far - congrats!!! Let me know what you think of the exhibition.
With love and paint splatters
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