0010 Homework Task - Jenny Saville, Propped

Propped, Jenny Saville, 1992

In Saville’s Propped, an oversized naked woman is sitting precariously on a high stool, posing very uncomfortably, propped. The woman is peering down at the audience from her gargantuan height with a defiant look. However her unconscious decision of having her hands desperately clutching her thighs and an expression of discomfort on her face suggests embarrassment. This woman, posing in such displeasing way is focused on the centre of the work of an empty background. She is painted from a low angle. The woman’s legs and hands are therefore disproportion-ally exaggerated in a larger scale than her chest and head. Her knees appear to protrude out from the painting, under a veil of text printed over the whole picture plan.

Visual Language:
With exquisite painting techniques, Saville uses symmetrical balance, warm analogous colours and strong tonal contrast (form) to interest the viewers.
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The frankness of Saville’s un-idealised naked female bodies in her monumental flesh paintings forces the viewers into new perception of woman’s body. Saville explores female bodies stripped bare, denuded of personality and context in her art. In Propped, Saville focuses on the sheer physicality of the woman’s body while giving no importance to the woman’s personality. She does this through allowing a strong tonal contrast on the naked flesh for interest while shadowing and slightly cropping the woman’s face for minute importance. Giving so much importance to the woman’s body, Saville is surely commenting on female’s exterior appearances. With her exaggerated nudes, she points out the disparity between the way women are perceived and the reality of woman’s body appearance. That is, not all female bodies are perfect or are in a shiny idealised way of the media.


Saville passed through her alchemical process in her art-making very successfully and therefore she transformed her base metals into 'gold' of great worth.

Other works by Jenny Saville:

Reverse (2002 - 2003)















Suspension (2002 -2003)


By the way, this little script I found on the internet shows her mental alchemical process:

Saville calls herself a 'scavenger of images;' she prefers to work from photographs rather than living models. Her studio is a repository of images from old medical journals of bruises, scars, images of deformities and disease. On a recent visit to her brother's farm in England, she found and photographed the corpse of a dead pig. The subsequent painting shows its distended stomach splayed across a huge canvas. Reminiscent of the paintings of Chaim Soutine, Saville was drawn to this subject matter because of her interest in the medical world's use of pig organs for human transplant as well as cloning. With Saville's handling, this potentially revolting subject is disturbing yet glorious.

http://www.gagosian.com/artists/jenny-saville