still

Jenny Saville, Still, 2003. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, gift of Martin and Toni Sosnoff, 2011. Image via The Met.

Jenny Saville attends to the flesh in thick lashings of oil paint. She relishes in the perception of the human body, mainly painting monumental self-portraits, nudes, fleshy women who counter the male gaze. In Still, Jenny Saville paints a woman’s head, tightly cropped and magnified to her immense scale – this one is 2.7 by 3.6 metres. Her head rests facing the viewer, showing swollen tissue and spots of dried blood. Her features droop, augmented and abstracted by nacreous blocks of turquoise, pearl and grey that cast the impression of clinical fluorescents on pallid skin. Greys give way to a silver slab behind the figure – a mortuary table.

While on fellowship, Saville studied under a plastic surgeon and engaged in a formative study of the human flesh, its reconstruction, transformation, and disfigurement. Saville relishes in imperfections of the flesh and body and the myriad of societal taboos that follow one that exists outside typical beauty standards. However, Still is one of few images to render post-mortem flesh in her oeuvre.

The physicality of Saville’s painterly surfaces often distract from the subject. Perhaps a more complex matter to ignore than her voluminous, towering nudes, her representations of the body are never intended to be grotesque. Yet, they carry an abject quality – something which threatens the boundaries of society: disorder, decay, the female body – in this case, the body is abjection in two parts because the figure is both dead and a woman.

Ealan Wingate (director of Saville’s gallery, Gagosian) explains Saville has no intention of upsetting the viewer. She is simply in awe – “it’s the fascination of flesh, of the body and how it moves.” [1] In Still, she renders the fragility of flesh in streaks of burgundy that slice the forehead and brown pigments coagulate in bruising around the eye. Her brushstrokes build colour and texture until they resemble the pliable surface of the skin. When something is so large, it’s easy to get caught up in the details.

[1] Source.