The Horror and Beauty of Jenny Saville

    Today I want to talk about a contemporary artist that I have found to be really amazing and profound. in my quest to find new artists and being in this contemporary art history class I've come across many artists that I've never seen or heard of before. That's when I came across an artist named Jenny Saville. 

https://www.theartstory.org/artist/saville-jenny/

    She's an artist who has studied corpses in the morgue. Typically the figures she draws and paints are female, nude, and obese. Saville was born in Cambridge, England, in 1970, and studied at the Glasgow School of Art from 1988 to 1992. In 1991, she also attended the University of Cincinnati. Her research concentrated on the "imperfections" of flesh, including the taboos and social ramifications. She was interested in the many ways that flesh is altered and deformed. She studied classical and Renaissance sculpture, looked at cadavers in the morgue, analyzed meat and animals, investigated medical diseases, and saw people whose physique defied gender stereotypes among other things. She is mostly known for oil painting. 

    I found her artwork particularly striking it captures the beautiful in-moment feeling that a portrait can have as any life drawing can. It's in the way she paints these portraits and most of her artwork in general with a somber tone a remorseful feeling there's something in the eyes of all the people she paints a sadness of sorts. 

        The faces in these portraits are almost melting the skin ripping off almost like they're decaying she paints these faces in a more disintegrating quality that gives an unworldly somber feeling to every face even the ones that are of young people.I think I enjoy that balance of light and dark and how she incorporates beauty into horror. I'm glad I came across her work and have seen something so different and profound.

All the Pictures I used are the property of Jenny Saville and the galleries that show them.