18/07/25
Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting
National Portrait Gallery, London
20 June – 7 September 2025
“Flesh is all things. Ugly, beautiful, repulsive, compelling, anxious, neurotic, dead, alive” – Jenny Saville
I remember first encountering the paintings of Jenny Saville (b1970, Cambridge) as a student and thinking they were amazing but also disgusting and not something I would want on my wall. To responses like this, Saville has said: “People say they’re good, but they couldn’t live with them. They’re not meant for that. I want them hung in public, all together, so they relate to each other, not be tucked away in people’s homes.” Certainly, seeing the works in the flesh (pun intended) is an entirely different experience from seeing them in a book or on a screen. They are immense. As in ginormous. Gargantuan. Frequently nine feet tall. You are not looking at a body, you are becoming a part of that body, that skin. The abjection of it all becomes so overwhelming that it is sublime. The viewer is left gasping for breath, completely absorbed into the painting.
Read my full review here