Jenny Saville, the British figurative painter creates art that concerns the nature of the body in the modern era. Rising to prominence in the mid 1990's, her work, often depicting female nudes in exaggerated grotesque states, being deformed, obese, mutilated or brutalized function as a dark reflection of contemporary fashion, as well as preconceived notions of female beauty. The morbidity of her representations, often bleeding or beaten women rebel against the idealised portraits of women pioneered by a male dominated field throughout the history of modern art, dating back to archaic Greece and the synthesis of the first paradigms of female beauty and the nude. With her work varying in style, links can be forged between other artists such as both Lucien Freud, as they share the same obsession for the human form and Peter Paul Reubens, for their similar manner of rendering human flesh. She cites her inspiration from everyday activities, and through critical observation she seeks to be "a painter of modern life, and modern bodies" with a particular emphasis on portraying bodies that are more common in society, such as the obese rather than the anorexic.
Born in 1970, Saville went to the Lilley and Stone School in Newark, Nottinghamshire, for her secondary education. She would then go on to gaining a degree at the Glasgow School of Art (1988-1992), later being awarded the Craig award and the Newberry Award, which was a six-month scholarship to the University of Cincinnati. It was at Cincinnati that she sites inspiration for many of her works depicting overweight or obese women, stating that she saw "Lots of big women, Big white flesh in shorts and T-Shirts. It was good to see because they had the physicality that I was interested in". This reverence for physicality she, in...