Jenny Saville

Private Collection (acquired directly from the artist)
Sale: Sotheby's, London, Contemporary Art, 19 June 2006, Lot 686
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

Glasgow, Glasgow School of Art, Graduation Show-1991, 1991

Richard Segal, Monica Segal, DeDe Young, Jared Pruzan, Eds. Contemporary Realism: The Seavest Collection, Portland, 2007, p.149

Colours: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is warmer and richer in the original. Condition: This work is in good condition. There are fine drying cracks in places throughout, some of which have been stabilised, and a few small spots of flaking towards the top left hand corner. Examination under ultra-violet light reveals that some of the stabilised cracks fluoresce.
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Executed in 1991 and exhibited at the extraordinary Glasgow School of Art degree show, where all of her works were immediately sold, Self Portrait is a remarkable painting which reveals the founding of Saville's distinctive style. Acclaimed for her visceral, unapologetic painting technique and radical use of the body as her subject, her unique approach to form would go on to define the importance of painting within the YBA scene in the early 1990s.

The present work is a self-portrait, showing the student Saville staring out of the picture plane, sitting unabashedly on the lavatory. Her body, and the room which locates her, are built from the voluptuous architectonic strokes of pigment-loaded brushes, the hatching and swathes constructing a scene which irreverently subverts the conventional genre of portraiture. This direct visual language has become Saville's trademark, where depictions of giant, weighty nudes transcend the pleasantries of narrative mimesis to convey excruciating emotions. With Self Portrait, we are faced with the brutality of the confrontational image and the cumbersome physical presence of the sitter, pants around her knees, her exposed flesh laid bare. The voyeuristic 'gaze' of the viewer has been turned on its head and mocked by Saville's visual assault, yet the compelling luxuriousness of the heavily painted subject, and its sheer physical presence, engenders a disconcerting dialogue between the viewer and the viewed. 

The documentary nature of Self Portrait and its painterly expansiveness has its roots in the art historical tradition of figure painting. In an interview in 1997, Saville said, 'I was always drawn to the body; Velázquez, Rubens – paintings that involved flesh. Bacon especially, and Soutine... I remember having quite a few of De Kooning's Woman series on my bedroom when I was in my teens. I like the way they are so frontal, the way the whole body folds out, and envelopes the whole frame' (Jenny Saville interviewed by Martin Gayford, Exhibition Catalogue, New York, Gagosian Gallery, Jenny Saville: Territories, 1999, p. 29). With Self Portrait, we are presented with an original, frank and uncompromising early painting which powerfully conveys the technical mastery of oil and provocative, compelling subject matter which underpins Saville's most exciting work. It is an extraordinary and important precursor to a body of work which would go on to place Saville firmly at the forefront of contemporary British painting.