Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting at the National Portrait Gallery is Saville’s first institutional exhibition in the UK. Curated by Sarah Howgate over seven years, it spans 30 years and 45 works, highlighting “scratching” as a central theme in both surface texture and emotional depth.
From the outset, Saville established a distinctive voice, blending classical figuration and modern abstraction. Influences from Freud and Bacon are evident in her early works, but she quickly diverged with bold, feminist self-portraits.
One such work is Propped (1992), painted at age 21, which confronts the viewer with a tense, defiant female figure atop a metal bollard. Mirror-written text by Luce Irigaray encourages women to find their own language of embodiment. While reminiscent of Freud’s palette, Saville’s emphasis on mass, stillness, and unidealized female flesh offered a radical alternative.
Through the late 1990s, her style intensified—merging abstraction and figuration with chaotic, visceral energy. Works like Hyphen (1999), a large self-portrait with her sister, exemplify her immersive scale. Saville often disrupts illusion by gouging surfaces, as seen in Trace (1993) and Stare (2004–5), where layered underpaintings peek through ruptures in the skin.
The show includes pieces from both public and private collections, with standout works like Aleppo (2017–18), a harrowing painting of limp children’s bodies draped over a stone-like figure, recalling an altarpiece. Originally exhibited in Edinburgh, it returns here accompanied by somber Pietà-inspired drawings that underscore Saville’s focus on fragility and loss. Her works on death and decay—sometimes based on medical or forensic imagery—can be uneasy, but they never feel exploitative.
Saville’s perspective on motherhood is showcased in a dedicated gallery featuring charcoal and pencil studies of her pregnant form and her children. These fragmented drawings capture the energy of infancy and reflect limited time for focused work. Referencing Renaissance depictions of the Virgin and Child, Saville offers a maternal perspective filled with motion and unrest.
This maternal theme extends into large-scale works like Odalisque (2012–14) and Compass (2013), where intertwined bodies blur identity and boundaries. Charcoal marks layered on painted flesh evoke both intimacy and time’s passage.
The final gallery features recent works such as Rupture (2020), Eve (2022–23), and Messenger (2020–21), marked by dynamic underpainting, fragmented figures, and recurring motifs like parted lips revealing teeth. Messenger stands out for its mysterious presence and spectral light.
Throughout the exhibition, Saville’s masterful sense of scale remains a constant. Even in the relatively confined spaces of the National Portrait Gallery—compared to the expanses of Gagosian or private collections—her canvases retain their immersive power. Her exploration of crying, pain, bleeding, and fear feels sincere, never performative.
