Jenny Saville, National Portrait Gallery review — horror rendered with featherlight tenderness

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Jenny Saville’s “Aleppo” (2017-18) is a work of intense human horror experienced in the flesh. Made following the bombardment of the Syrian city, “Aleppo” centres on a cinder-dark figure, blank as stone, across which rise the limp bodies of children. Soft-skinned legs in little sandals layer over one another, and heads flop back again and again, as though an endless sequence of mothers were picking up their lost children. “Aleppo” has the gravity of an altarpiece but is rendered with featherlight tenderness in charcoal and pastel, a fragile thing, like life. In Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting, which opens at the National Portrait Gallery in London this week, it hangs, appropriately, beside the artist’s sombre drawings made after the Pietà — the Virgin Mary cradling the lifeless body of her son. 

I wept in front of “Aleppo” when I first saw it in Edinburgh in 2018 — its display coinciding with the last substantial British exhibition of Saville’s work, at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. Like the London exhibition, it was a jolting reminder of the precocity of Saville’s talent. She seemed to emerge fully formed aged 22: an enquiring and prodigiously skilled painter of the human figure. Over the course of the 1990s her work was acquired by Charles Saatchi, exhibited in the notorious Sensation at the Royal Academy of Arts, and picked up for representation by Gagosian gallery. By the end of the decade, as she turned 30, Saville was reinventing the nude for the contemporary era — an artist pushing, scraping and swiping oil paint to its fleshiest extremes.

The opening vista of The Anatomy of Painting comes to rest on Propped (1992). First exhibited in Saville’s graduation show from Glasgow School of Art, it remains potent and disquieting. A tensed and fleshy female body is perched painfully on a metal bollard, knees rearing forward and head part cropped. Propped communicates both invitation and mortification: the woman’s mouth is tilted in a pout, her breasts are lifted forward, and her feet clad in dainty white pumps, but her curled fingers claw into the flesh of her thighs, and the torque of her ankles betrays the pain of holding her body in position. 

Gouged into the surface of the painting, in mirror writing, are inverted lines from the feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray in which she exhorts women to find their own language to inscribe their experience of being in the world. Using herself as a model, in “Propped” Saville responds to Irigaray’s call. The painting reflects on the contradictory demands placed on young women: to judge and hate their flesh; to be sexy and “up for it”; to imagine themselves the object of another’s gaze; to dedicate so much anxious thought to their body that they can barely see beyond it. 

Elevating the body and painting it at scale, Saville creates an immersive territory, an unconstrained expanse that — in works like the magisterial and uncanny self-portrait with her sister “Hyphen” (1999) — dominate the entire field of vision. 

Gouging into the surface, Saville interferes with the illusory space of the painting, snatching the viewer back from luxuriance in pure image and forcing awareness of the artifice of its construction. She returns to the technique in “Trace” (1993), a canvas near filled by a female back, from buttock to shoulder, into which cruel indentations of elastic have been etched, demarcating recently removed knickers, tights and bra. Later, in works such as “Stare” (2004-5) Saville exposes her painting’s inner workings through gaps in the surface of a face, offering a view through to a splattered layer of abstract underpainting.

“Propped” was first shown opposite a mirror — allowing the writing to be read, but also showing the body framed in self-reflection. Saville remains interested in the medium through which a body or face is viewed and how this influences the apprehension of it. She works from her own photographs, from images found in medical books and police documentation of homicides. Sometimes Saville’s paintings of the dead read simply as portraits in which something indefinable is awry. Not so Witness (2009), in which a shocking exploded mouth appears scrambled in a mess of bloody paint. 

The centrepiece of The Anatomy of Painting is a small gallery honouring the transformative impact of motherhood. Here are Saville’s drawings of her own body and others — pregnant and holding babies — as well as studies of her growing children. The shift in medium from oil paint to charcoal and pencil reflects the diminished time available for art in the demanding years of early motherhood. The drawings layer sketch upon sketch — studies of time as well as objects in space — illustrating the interrupted nature of working with small children, and capturing the restless body of a wriggling baby. Saville takes on the long heritage of the Virgin and child in works by Leonardo and Michelangelo, presenting it afresh from the mother’s perspective, with an infant that is anything but still and serene.

From motherhood and the experience of creating flesh from her flesh, Saville came to explore the movement of intertwining adult bodies. In “Odalisque” (2012-14) and “Compass” (2013) a couple appear in shifting fragments. The focal point of Compass is a penis, rendered in detail and resting between open legs, which move up into a torso that dissolves into the same soup of flesh that forms the female nude beside it. Disembodied fingers emerge, in turn from the crook of the female figure’s knee. In the background of “Odalisque”, a mirror shows the back view of a woman, arranged like Velázquez’s Venus. It does not reflect the position of the figures in the foreground, who recline in a tangle of legs and torsos captured as they move through different configurations. Their oil-painted flesh is layered over charcoal sketches, a document of passing time that suggests the intimacy of the pair, losing sense of the boundary between one body and another.

I struggled in the exhibition’s final gallery. In Saville’s most recent bodies of work, faces are built up over hectic underpainting tonally distant from flesh. Many — among them “Rupture” (2020) and “Eve” (2022-3) — feature young women as blandly attractive as fashion models. The paintings are skilful, with the integrity of the figure pushed to the point of fragmentation. Human features float against a storm of electric colours, recalling Alicia Vikander’s perfect face on her machine body in the film Ex Machina (2014). Yet with a few exceptions — notably “Messenger” (2020-1) in which an enigmatic young girl appears bathed in prismatic light — these works feel affectless, like hollow conjuring tricks. Shown together they expose Saville’s compositional tics, including a preference for baby soft lips which are inevitably parted to show a flash of teeth. 

At its best, Saville’s work is rooted in profound emotional and human response: she probes devotion, intimacy, grief and disgust. Works like “Aleppo” or “Hyphen” are experienced in the body. While honouring the audacious skill of her early explorations of the flesh, The Anatomy of Painting is a snapshot of an artist in mid-career, still restless, enquiring and pushing in new directions.

June 20-September 7, npg.org.uk

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