Jenny Saville was bore in Cambridge, England in 1970. She began her art studies at the Glasgow School of Art in Scotland in 1988. She graduated in 1992 after a successful senior art show where Charles Saatchi bought some of her work. He then commissioned her for an 18-month contract where she worked on new pieces for the Saatchi Gallery in London. She is a member of the Young British Artists (YBA), though she is not what the public always expects because of her traditional work with oil painting. She currently resides and works in London as a teacher at the Slade School of Art [1]. Her artwork seems to show her view on how society views women. She paints them with vastly exaggerated features and gives them a shape that seems to make them turn into life-like cartoons. She has even included herself into theses paintings as well with a few self portraits shown in solo exhibitions and also done in group exhibitions. She exaggerates the female figure by getting up close and personal with the body and her body filling the canvas through a combination of bulk and extreme foreshortening. Contour lines, similar to those drawn on a map, are drawn across the surface of the woman's skin. The focus of her work is to pull you in with the painting to the point where it doesn't even seem like a human form anymore, but more of an abstract painting that you are viewing. The Saatchi gallery is like the starting point to her career as an artist, just like many other young artists that are involved with the gallery. She mainly uses oil paintings for her work, unless she is collaborating on a piece like in the Closed Contact series where she worked with Glen Luchford on c-prints and plexiglass. She has shown a lot of her work with the Young British Artists over the years.
British figure painter
"I like working. My friends get pissed off. I cancel dinner dates and all that kind of stuff because I like being in my studio." [2]