Jenny Saville

Jenny Saville, has been revitalizing contemporary figurative painting since the early 1990s. As part of the Young British Artists (YBA), a loose group of British painters and sculptors who came to prominence in the late 1980s and early 1990s, she has challenged the boundaries of the genre and explored questions about society's view of the body and its potential.

Her paintings focus on the human body, drawing inspiration for her close-up studies of skin and flesh from a wide variety of sources, ranging from the early paintings of masters such as Titian and Tintoretto to reconstructive plastic surgery. Saville's works blur the line between classical painting and modern abstraction. The works have a physicality, she applies paint in thick layers, scraping, adding and removing. Her expressions, which have some common points of contact with Francis Bacon's deformed bodies and Chaïm Soutine's studies of flesh from the 1920s, among others. Saville's bodies, however, always have a sense of pride and refuse to be hidden; each body comes forward and break with the objectifying depictions of art history.

The collaboration between the painter Saville and the fashion photographer/filmmaker Glen Luchford questions and challenges notions of female beauty. The symbiosis between the worlds of art and fashion has produced many hybrid forms in recent years, but none perhaps as striking as this series of images. Here, the artists have created a new form of self-portraiture, with Saville herself acting as the model.