Jenny Saville

The Great Women Artists

Katy Hessel

Arts

4.8 • 877 Ratings

🗓️ 22 March 2025

⏱️ 35 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

I am so excited to say that my guest on the GWA Podcast is one of the most renowned painters working in the world right now: Jenny Saville. Hailed for her at times colossal paintings of the human form – from close ups of the face, to examinations of exposed flesh – Saville is fascinated with the complex vessels that we all live inside. Theatrical and grotesque, beautiful and painful, her presentations of the body can feel almost like a landscape, pressed up against the surface of the canvas, in her masterful handling of paint that ranges from wet, to dry, oily to thin, thick and with shards and smears of colour. At once uneasy, raw, tense, and animal-like, Saville’s portrayals of the body show how it transforms, grows, decays, and breathes… While full of contradictions, there is always a beauty, from the colours Saville uses to the golden light and textures that accentuate a knee, or finger. Born in Cambridge in 1970, as one of four siblings, Saville studied at the Glasgow School of Art in the 80s and 90s, and spent her final year in Cincinnati, Ohio, where she was exposed to a new set of American artists and feminist thought. In the 1990s, Saville quickly became one of the most anticipated painters challenging not just the medium of paint, or the depiction of the body, but reinventing the female nude or semi-nude body as a subject that has been entrenched in a male-gazed art history. Tackling Biblical and mythological narratives, referencing ancient Venus-like figures, as well as her own experience as a mother, Saville has constantly configured new ways of presenting the body, and in more recent years, has turned to stark, saturated colouring This year, she will open exhibitions at the Albertina, Vienna, her first major solo show in Austria; Anatomy of Painting at the National Portrait Gallery, London – that will bring together 50 works – and will travel to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas, for us to see the incredible trajectory of an artist who keeps reinventing flesh with paint – and I can’t wait to find out more… LINKS! Albertina: https://www.albertina.at/en/exhibitions/jenny-saville/ NPG: https://www.npg.org.uk/whatson/exhibitions/2025/jenny-saville/?_gl=1*136gpph*_up*MQ..*_gs*MQ..&gclid=Cj0KCQjwv_m-BhC4ARIsAIqNeBt-ZzQivw0289iG5mzsW59uEmn-IUiod6qXx6jVk9rOLTLV9trgo20aAiw7EALw_wcB -- THIS EPISODE IS GENEROUSLY SUPPORTED BY THE LEVETT COLLECTION: https://www.famm.com/en/ https://www.instagram.com/famm_mougins // https://www.merrellpublishers.com/9781858947037 Follow us: Katy Hessel: @thegreatwomenartists / @katy.hessel Sound editing by Nada Smiljanic Music by Ben Wetherfield

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello everyone and welcome back to season 13 of the Great Women Artists podcast. I am so excited to be sharing this upcoming season with you and to say that this series is again supported by the Levitt Collection, a vast and varied art collection of which a major and ever-increasing portion is dedicated to works by women artists. Today, there are over
0:22.5	600 works by women artists in the collection. After publishing the must-have book, Abstract
0:28.5	Expressionists, The Women in 2003, Christian Levitt went on to open on the 21st of June last year,
0:35.5	FAMM, the first private museum in Europe entirely dedicated to women artists,
0:40.8	which is just utterly amazing.
0:43.1	Located in Mujan, near Cannes in the south of France, this newly transformed space
0:47.6	features a stunning collection of over 100 works by many of the leading female artists
0:52.5	that span from the Impressionist period to the contemporary today.
0:56.3	Think Tracy Eman to Marina Abramovich, past podcast guests, I might add.
1:00.3	The impressive exhibition of painting, sculptures and photographs from the Leveck Collection
1:04.3	highlight the creative brilliance of women who have played pivotal roles in shaping some of the major artistic movements of the modern period.
1:12.8	Only 30 minutes from Nice Airport, FAMM, which stands for female artists of the Mujan Museum,
1:18.7	is open every day and for further information and bookings, please visit www.fam.com.
1:25.9	I hope you enjoy this episode.
1:32.9	Hello everyone and welcome to The Great Women Artist podcast with me, Katie Hessel.
1:39.1	Some of you might know me from The Great Women Artists, an Instagram account I set up in
1:43.1	October 2015, which celebrates
1:45.4	female artists on a daily basis, ranging from young graduates to old masters. Well, in a similar
1:51.9	fashion to the Instagram, this podcast is all about celebrating female artists from a variety
1:57.5	of backgrounds and histories. And I am so excited to be interviewing artists on their career
2:02.7	or artists, writers, curators or general art lovers
2:05.8	on the women artist who means most of them.
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