Jenny Saville

Jenny Saville is a modern British painter best known for her works depicting nude female figures in large scale. She credits her approach to the works of Pablo Picasso, which showed her the depiction of people as if they were substantial rather than ephemeral. One of her better known works, Branded, is in oil on a 7' x 6' canvas. Jenny Saville painted her own face on a female form that was obese, with a midsection and breasts that are the size of caricature. The figure is even holding out skin folds in a way that seems demonstrative. Fulcrum features three obese female forms on an 8 1/2' x 16' canvas, all stacked on a medical trolley. After painting, Saville applied thin tape strips vertically and then took them off, causing a contrast between the straight lines and the curves of the flesh. Her work seems to counter the societal "ideal" of the slender female form.