Jenny Saville

Jenny Saville is a British painter celebrated for her large, powerful paintings of the human body. Born in Cambridge in 1970, she came to attention in the 1990s as part of the group known as the Young British Artists. She became known for huge canvases of fleshy, monumental nudes, often women, painted with thick, sweeping strokes that treat the body as a landscape of mass and movement.

Her work challenges polished ideals of beauty, showing bodies that are heavy, marked, or caught mid-transformation, and she draws on old masters as much as on modern life. Up close her paint is loose and abstract, resolving into flesh only at a distance. Saville is regarded as one of the most important figurative painters working today, and her canvases command great attention and high prices.