Contemporary British Painter Jenny Saville is known for large-scale female nudes.
She appropriates techniques and poses that are associated with male masters such as Leonardo da Vinci or Willen de Kooning to interject her own point of view as a woman. The subjects behind her paintings include motherhood, dieting, plastic surgery, exercise and the objectification of the female body in popular culture. The image shown here, entitled Strategy (1994), uses oil paint on an enormous canvas. It’s located in the newly built Broad Museum in Los Angeles. The building, designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, houses the personal collection of philanthropists Eli and Edythe Broad. Strategy is at least three times the size of a human, looms over the observer and powerfully dominates the room in which it is displayed. The work is a clear challenge to art history’s status quo of a clothed male artist depicting naked female subjects for an audience of men.
This historic perspective renders the female body and image unreal.
Saville’s unidealized images of human bodies that often are damaged and altered challenge notions many of us have concerning beauty and the female image. While she was in Cincinnati she remarked that she saw “Lots of big women. Big white flesh in shorts and t-shirts.” She went on to explain she was very interested in their physicality and saw parallels with subjects that Pablo Picasso painted, which were solid and stable. This particular image was used as a jacket cover for the Manic Street Preachers’ album entitled The Holy Bible in 1994. Interestingly, it was considered “inappropriate” and sold with a plain cover in many locations. Saville states, “I’m not painting disgusting, big women. I am painting women who’ve been made to think they’re big and disgusting.”