Tim Healey reviews ‘Jenny Saville: The Anatomy Of Painting’ exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, London.
It is rare that a contemporary art exhibition sucks you in like a black hole while simultaneously seeming to bulge out of each masterpiece. This is such a show.
Jenny Saville made her name painting bodies at a scale. She paints with a frankness that makes it impossible to look away. Emerging in the early 1990s as part of the Young British Artists, she focused, relentlessly, on the depiction of flesh: its weight, presence and vulnerability.
Her early portraits mostly capture women often bruised, stretched, or surgically marked – and yet each image is both confrontational and tender. Faced with her work, one recalls Rubens or Rembrandt – as much as one can see the echoes of Lucian Freud.
Saville hasn’t just painted women (she paints men too) – but her in her female-focused work, she interrogates how women are seen, handled and looked at. Her painting surfaces are seemingly restless: layered and smeared – sometimes into abstraction.
Make no mistake, most of these images are massive: big paintings – several feet across. They mesmerise and impress. They are frankly astonishing to behold. Motherhood, classical references and ideas of transformation course through her later canvases. Saville’s work here is at once arresting, huge, intense, abstract and simultaneously hyper-real.
And then there’s way she paints eyes. As you confront these portraits, typically the eyes gaze directly at you, huge, glassy, piercing, ‘just there’. They forge an emotional connection with each viewer.
If you see one exhibition this summer. Make it this.
Jenny Saville: The Anatomy Of Painting 20 June – 7 September 2025, The National Portrait Gallery, St Martin’s Place, London, WC2H 0HE.
Book tickets: https://www.npg.org.uk/whatson/exhibitions/2025/jenny-saville/
