Jenny Saville

In a society often obsessed with physical appearance, Jenny Saville has created a niche for overweight women in contemporary visual culture. During her degree course at Glasgow School of Art Jenny Saville exhibited at Contemporary 90 at London’s Royal College of Art. Following the success of a show at the Saatchi Gallery, London in 1994 Saville went on to take part in the exhibition American Passion, which toured from the McLellan Gallery, Glasgow, to the Royal College of Art and the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Connecticut. Saville also took part in 1997’s controversial Sensation exhibition at the Royal Academy of Art, London alongside fellow Young British Artists Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, Gary Hume, Jake and Dinos Chapman and Chris Ofili, and had a successful show at New York’s Gagosian Gallery. Saville has often been compared to Lucian Freud, though she herself feels ‘much closer to Bacon and de Kooning’.