Exhibition Reports

Jenny Saville

National Portrait Gallery London

Seen on 21 June 2025

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This a large scale showm, and a great success for a living artist.  Saville has established herself as one of he foremost figurative painters of our time.  With excellent handling of form and paint, and good drawing, these are striking, memorable, and have entered the history books.

 

These may be ead as images which may have a very particular impact on women, as many of the early ones show the female form form dynamic uncompromising angles, and not with an emphasis on makeup or preening but rather with a raw, fertile, natural attractiveness.

 

Later works seem to hint of anatomical drawings as though they are entering the flesh, again focusing on more essential aspects of femininity rather than outward forms.

 

Many appear to be self portraits.  Saville has a distinctive feature in her lips, and these appear to have strong treatment and attention with the paint.

 

In one of the paintings it is though he formal treatment, or realism is fighting with expressive underling strokes, which hint at interiority. 

 

The drawings on display show excellent line and command of form

 

The images that are reminiscent of madonnas also show the mother pregnant, which perhaps shows the story more from the point of the view of the woman, going her more authority and agency over the scene 

 

The paintings in the final room, which are more recent, show a focus more on surface and perhaps more 'cosmeticified' images of female faces - with colours reminiscent of magazines, social media etc.

 

The fragmentation visible in these paintings is documented as having some relevance to AI.

 

Perhaps this focuses on a sense of objectification the gaze, both female and male.