Chance Encounters, Edition 62
Exhibition Preview: Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting in Fort Worth
Painting is my natural language. I feel in my own universe when I’m painting. – Jenny Saville
In this edition, I am surveying the career of Jenny Saville (British, b. 1970) in anticipation of the exhibition opening Sunday, October 12, 2025 at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas. The exhibition, The Anatomy of Painting, was organized by the National Portrait Gallery in London, where it was shown over the summer. The exhibition was the largest of Saville’s works in the United Kingdom and it will be her first major museum survey in the United States. The artist is known for her neo-expressionist approach to painting portraits and figure groups, in which the use of paint imitates textures and colors of flesh, but often in exaggerated, intense ways.
Saville was drawn to art-making from an early age and also developed a fascination with all types of flesh in her youth. From 1988 to 1992, she attended Glasgow School of Art in Scotland and the artist’s 1992 degree exhibition was an immediate sensation and attracted positive critical response. Propped was one of the first of Saville’s works to draw attention and it demonstrates the artist’s well-known focus on the imperfections of human flesh. Inscribed across the painting is text written backwards, as if it is a reminder the woman in the painting has noted down for herself. The text is taken from an essay by French feminist writer Luce Irigaray: “If we continue to speak in this sameness — speak as men have spoken for centuries, we will fail each other. Again. Words will pass through our bodies, above our heads — disappear, make us disappear.”
Human perception of the body is so acute and knowledgeable that the smallest hint of a body can trigger recognition. – Jenny Saville
In college, Saville focused on figural painting, in spite of the fact that many of her fellow students’ judged the subject “quaint.” The artist chose to paint on a large scale and to demonstrate through her dynamic surfaces that figure painting was anything but quaint. Saville’s depictions of women in this period aggressively challenge traditional notions of beauty, especially of female bodies. In Trace, we see the impressions of a woman’s undergarments on her nude body which is likely to be relatable for many women who have experienced the literal pressure of fashion’s dictates on their flesh.
I want to be a painter of modern life, and modern bodies, those that emulate contemporary life, they’re what I find most interesting. — Jenny Saville
From the very beginning of her career, Saville has used her own body as a subject and has used photographs of herself and others in working out her compositions. Hyphen depicts the artist’s head and her sister’s bent together at the neck. The surface composed of thick layered color, a characteristic which becomes increasingly prominent in the artist’s work, is visible in the skin tones. At this time, Saville’s type of figurative painting wasn’t very prominent in the art world, but it was what always interested her. The artist sees herself as maintaining and extending the long art historical tradition of painting the human form.
Saville is deeply familiar with the history of art. Artists that she cites as influences include recent masters Lucien Freud, Francis Bacon, and Frank Auerbach as well as earlier artists like Willem De Kooning, Edgar Degas, Tintoretto, and Titian. The artist has made a number of drawings inspired by works of art she has encountered in her study of art history. In this charcoal drawing, Saville reinterprets a famous preparatory drawing by Leonardo da Vinci, The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and Saint John the Baptist (also known as the Burlington Cartoon), drawn around 1500, now in the collection of the National Gallery in London. In this work the gentle, idealized Christ Child of Leonardo’s drawing becomes restless babies in constant motion.
I do hope I play out the contradictions that I feel, all the anxieties and dilemmas. If they’re there in the work, then that’s brilliant. – Jenny Saville
The illusion of movement is something that became more important in Saville’s works in the 2010s. Larger, more complex compositions like Intertwine show multiple figures seen alongside shadowy remnants of earlier positions. In this painting, gray tones contrast the naturalistic flesh colors, suggesting a black and white photograph or a stone sculpture has come to life.
In this video, Katharine Arnold, Christie’s Vice Chairman for 20th/21st Century Art, and Sarah Howgate, Senior Curator of Contemporary Collections at the National Portrait Gallery, London discuss The Anatomy of Painting as presented at the National Portrait Gallery during the summer of 2025.
I want people to know what it is they’re looking at. But at the same time, the closer they get to the painting, it’s like going back into childhood. And it’s like an abstract piece. It becomes the landscape of the brush marks rather than just sort of an intellectual landscape. – Jenny Saville
Works from the 2020s, like Chasah (2020) that opened this edition, Drift (2020-2022) and Eve (2022-2023), demonstrate Saville’s growing interest in experimenting with mixed media applications. Oil paint, oil stick, pastels, acrylic paints, and charcoal are layered in different combinations, allowing the artist to incorporate new color and textural combinations. The artist has always had a passion for the painting process, but in these more recent works the process is more apparent to the viewer.
Saville has spent her career absorbing multiple influences: studying medical pathologies and bodies in morgues, examining animals and meat, observing a plastic surgeon at work, and exploring works by the masters of art history. She has observed and photographed a wide variety of individuals and groups of people, including many people whose bodies challenge physical ideals, gender dichotomies, and any concept of “typical” bodies. Saville translates her studies and influences into large, colorful paintings which might be unsettling in their honesty and intensity. For this artist, the anatomy of the body and the anatomy of painting are endlessly engaging.
I’m not anti-conceptual art. I don’t think painting must be revived, exactly. Art reflects life, and our lives are full of algorithms, so a lot of people are going to want to make art that’s like an algorithm. But my language is painting, and painting is the opposite of that. There’s something primal about it. It’s innate, the need to make marks. That’s why, when you’re a child, you scribble. – Jenny Saville
Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting opens at The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas on Sunday, October 12, 2025 and continues until Sunday, January 18, 2026. LINK: https://www.themodern.org/exhibition/jenny-saville-anatomy-painting
Thank you for reading. If you’ve enjoyed what you see here at I Require Art, please like, comment, and share. If you visit the exhibition in Fort Worth, or if you saw the show in London, please share your thoughts. I’ll be back with more art soon.
Jenny Saville is represented by Gagosian, New York, London, Beverly Hills, Paris, Le Bourget, Rome, Basel, Gstaad, Athens and Hong Kong.
One of the best painters right now!
Glad to see Jennie Saville featured. She is brilliant.