Jenny Saville’s Long-Awaited Retrospective Is Coming To London’s National Portrait Gallery

This spread of images, a portrait of artist Jenny Saville by Glen Luchford, face bulging against a sheet of plexiglass, opposite her 1992 work Prop, made for a striking addition to Vogue’s Class of ’94 portfolio. Those who had also enjoyed a good year included Hugh Grant, the enduringly perplexed star of the surprise hit Four Weddings and a Funeral, designer du jour John Galliano and supermodel Naomi Campbell, who added a romantic novel, Swan, and a studio album, Babywoman, to her oeuvre.

Still, it was hard to escape 24-year-old Jenny Saville – not solely because her paintings were ambitious, monumental and arresting (Prop was, not untypically, seven-foot high). That year, Welsh rock band Manic Street Preachers put her triptych Strategy (South Face/Front Face/North Face) on the cover of their record The Holy Bible. The collector and gallerist Charles Saatchi presented her new work and, within the space of one week, Prop appeared in two Sunday supplements. The eminent critic David Sylvester wrote a buoyant review in The Observer, having at their first meeting mused, “I always thought women couldn’t become painters.” Saville was not unnerved, “When I graduated I would have been hard pressed to think of a single woman who showed in a museum…”

It has taken a while longer yet but in June London’s National Portrait Gallery gives over its entire ground floor to a full-scale retrospective. The Anatomy of Painting, arguably Saville’s most prominent museum show to date, will bring 50 of her works together from the ’90s to now.

And when she started out, anatomy was essentially the business she was in. Giant, heaving piles of flesh rendered in paint, skin tones of pink, blue and livid red, almost transparent so that veins pulsated with life. Those early figures were so imposingly there, one thought less of painting more of sculpture. Here was the female human form unburnished, unvarnished.

Luchford and Saville would collaborate again over the years, notably for Closed Contact (1995-6), a large-scale photo series that evolved out of their Vogue shoot, depicting Saville’s body further distorted against plexiglass. And as it happened Prop would appear again almost a year later in yet another publication: Physiotherapy Frontline, the magazine of the Chartered Society of Physiotherapy, boldly and unapologetically illustrating “Obesity in the ’90s”.

Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting is at National Portrait Gallery, WC2H, from 20 June to 7 September