Jenny Saville and Glen Luchford

In their collaborative series, Closed Contact (1995–96), painter Jenny Saville and fashion photographer Glen Luchford defy the male gaze and challenge deeply entrenched cultural assumptions about feminine beauty.

After observing reconstructive and aesthetic surgery during a 1994 fellowship in Connecticut, Saville became fascinated with the violence and viscerality of reconfigured flesh. The experience laid the groundwork for this series of work.  The artists met in the mid-1990s when British Vogue commissioned Luchford to take a portrait of Saville.  During this meeting, Luchford shot Saville as she pressed her face against a piece of Plexiglass, which compressed and magnified the features of her body. 

While both British artists came to prominence in their respective fields in the 1990s, their work at the time could not have been more disparate.  Luchford was well-known for his sleek editorial photographs of glamorous supermodels that appeared in  top fashion magazines and narrative, film-like campaigns for Prada and other high-fashion brands.  On the other hand, ‘Young British Artist ’ (YBA) Saville became infamous for her monumental, richly colored, highly textured figurative paintings portraying nude women at unusual, distorted angles.  Despite the polarity of their practices, in Closed Contact the pair found an artistic kinship that married elements of both their practices.

Luchford applied the highly cinematic qualities characteristic of his work, including dramatic lighting and deliberate cropping. Trading her bravura brushwork for photography, Saville continued her examination of the visceral qualities of the human form with the same scale, energy, and physicality inherent to her paintings.  

As the subject of this work, Saville refuses an objective position by evoking the abject. By employing the ‘aesthetics of disgust,’ Luchford and Saville present the raw, unflinching truth of flesh, prompting viewers to interrogate deeply entrenched assumptions of beauty and the permeation of female objectification in Western culture (Michelle Meagher, ‘Jenny Saville and a Feminist Aesthetics of Disgust,’ A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, vol. 18, no. 4, p. 23).

The Closed Contact series was exhibited in its entirety at Gagosian Beverly Hills in 2002.  Photographs from the series are held in institutional collections including the Aberdeen Art Gallery and the Denver Art Museum (2001.852).