Jenny Saville (British) - Gender, Body Image

“Saville’s work interrogates our perceptions of the female body in challenging ways. To use the self in this way is to come full circle in the questioning of fixed identity and the body” (Meskimmon 125). She challenges the male fantasy of the perfect body and opens doors to alternative notions of beauty. 

Saville fights society’s ideal of the perfect body by showing her own enlarged and distorted body, which becomes the opposite of the skin and bones we see on the covers of magazines. In many paintings, she uses her own head and face and the body of an obese woman. "Jenny Saville has visualised her concern about the tyranny wielded over women by the fantasy of the perfect body in a series of larger-than-life-size nudes overlain with contour lines, words, and the kind of marks made by plastic surgeons in preparation for their cuts. Her innovation was to use her own distorted and enlarged nude body" (Rideal 31). She also defies the “male gaze” as she faces the viewer and one cannot ignore that she is actively making a bold statement about the female body. The fact that most of her paintings and photographs depict the body covering the entirety of the canvas, and sometimes spilling over the edges, adds to the drama of viewing the human body’s flesh and imperfections. “Saville’s self-portrait nudes overwhelm in their excess” (Meskimmon 123-124). From this perspective, we see the details of these imperfections, and in some paintings we see the body with markings similar to that of a plastic surgeon and provocative words etched into the skin. These in-your-face enlarged and distorted views of the human body force the viewer to reflect on their own self-image and distorted views and emotions about their own body. “They draw out something that is repressed or obscure in the viewer’s experience and bring it to light” (Gray 8). She creates emotion by filling the field of view with raw flesh. 


"Branded" (above) is one example of Saville using her own face on top of her enlarged body. Here, the obese body is raw and shows every imperfection. The body is inscribed with words such as "delicate," 'supportive,' 'irrational,' 'decorative,' and 'petite.' I think that these words could be a kind of internal dialogue in Saville's mind or words that one thinks about when viewing a body in all its naturality. She grasps the folds of her skin as a kind of gesture that would be individually interpreted by the viewer. The body faces the viewer with purpose and stature and does not conform to the notion of a passive object to be viewed, but is instead very in-your-face. "Saville's work interrogates our perception of the female body in challenging ways. To use the self in this way is to come full circle in the questioning of fixed identity and the body" (Meskimmon 125).


Text from: http://art1eproject.wetpaint.com/page/Jenny+Saville