Jenny Saville

Born in Cambridge in 1970 and educated at Glasgow School of Art, Jenny Saville is today based between Oxford and the Italian city of Palermo. Best known for monumental oil-on-canvas nudes, she employs a visceral painterly language – thick impasto, scrapes and drips – to interrogate flesh, identity and the politics of looking. Charcoal drawings and mixed-media collages extend her exploration of the body, often referencing medical imagery or art-historical precedents. Saville’s work entered major public collections early: the Tate, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Broad and the Scottish National Gallery all hold key paintings. Market demand is buoyant and liquid; her canvases command multi-million-pound results at Christie’s and Sotheby’s, with Propped setting an auction record of £9.5 million in 2018, placing her among the most valuable living British painters. While she has not pursued the prize circuit avidly, Saville received early patronage from Charles Saatchi and was elected to the Royal Academy in 2014, underscoring her critical and institutional standing.