“There is a thing about beauty...And there can be beauty in individualism.”
Revelling in its fleshy abundance and towering at an all-encompassing three metres in height, Jenny Saville’s blockbuster Juncture from 1994 stages a spectacle in pure unadulterated pigment, underscoring the painter's approach to the figurative tradition. A landmark within the artist's epochal series of 1990s monumental nudes – including the record-breaking Propped (1992), Shift (1996–97), and Strategy (1993–94), now housed in The Broad in Los Angeles – Juncture brazenly asserts itself not as a passive representation but as an alive, organic and active force, potent with theatricality and corporeality, and refusing to be overlooked. Created during a prolific five-year period between 1992 and 1997, Juncture emerges at the critical midpoint between two defining moments in Saville’s early career: the explosive debut of Propped at her Glasgow School of Art degree show in 1992, and her inclusion in the infamous and controversial Sensation exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1997, curated by Charles Saatchi. Widely documented across critical literature on Saville and exhibited in some of the most prestigious museums worldwide – including in 2005-06 at the National Portrait Gallery in London and Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney – Saville’s confrontational portrait proclaims her as one of the most compelling and innovative painters of a generation, inaugurating a visual language that is both unapologetically feminist and emotively visceral. Monumental in scale and virtuosic in facture, Juncture develops five centuries of art historical tradition with audacious authority, securing its position as one of the most emblematic and consequential works of Saville’s early 1990s output.
Right: Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, The Grande Odalisque, 1814. Musée du Louvre, PariS. Image: © Louvre, Paris, France / Bridgeman Images
An unyielding feminist impulse and a spirit of defiant subversion course through Saville’s oeuvre, an intellectual foundation that first took root during her t.mes as an undergraduate at the Glasgow School of Art. In 1991, during her third year, Saville received a scholarship to spend a term at the University of Cincinnati, an experience that would become a pivotal inflection point, fundamentally reshaping the trajectory of her artistic development. While she continued to attend studio classes, it was the university’s wider curriculum – particularly a course in Écriture Féminine within the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies – that proved wholly transformative. Here, for the first t.mes , Saville encountered the theoretical frameworks that exposed the marginalisation of female voices within the canon of art history. Reflecting on this period, Saville recalled: “I'd always wondered why there had been no women artists in history. I found there had been – but not reported. I realised I'd been affected by male ideas, going through a male-dominated art college” (The artist quoted in: Hunter Davies, “This is Jenny, and This is Her Plan,” The Independent, 1 March 1994, p. 21). This realisation initially prompted Saville to interrogate the very legitimacy of painting itself, momentarily renouncing the medium as inextricably entangled within a patriarchal art historical canon. Yet this rupture was short-lived. Empowered by the feminist discourses of Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva, Saville re-entered the studio with a newly galvanised resolve, intent on asserting a space for female subjectivity and agency within the enduring structures of pictorial representation
“The realisation of my relationship to the history of art as a woman, as a vision in art, and not really a producer of culture. I was frustrated by this but it gave me great determination. It made me really want to paint”
collects or, curator and art world provocateur, Charles Saatchi, first encountered Saville’s work when she appeared emblazoned on the front cover of The t.mes s Saturday Review, which featured her standout painting Propped, and the window display of the Cooling Gallery on Cork Street, where Branded was included in the fourth Critics’ Choice exhibition. At the t.mes , Saville had just completed her undergraduate degree at the Glasgow School of Art and was preparing to embark on her postgraduate studies when Saatchi reached out. Following a meeting in London, he offered the young artist a stipend to create a new body of work for a dedicated exhibition at his gallery. Founded in 1985, the Saatchi Gallery – then located on Boundary Road in North West London – had established a formidable reputation for presenting landmark exhibitions of postwar American artists, including Cy Twombly, Robert Ryman, Richard Serra, and Bruce Nauman. By 1992, however, Saatchi had redirected his gaze towards the emergent cohort of British artists graduating from the UK's art schools, assuming a central role in shaping and amplifying the phenomenon that would soon crystallise as the YBA movement. Working discreetly in her Glasgow studio, Saville spent more than a year developing five new large-scale paintings, which she would eventually exhibit alongside her three breakout degree works – Branded, Propped, and Prop – in Young British Artists III, staged at the Saatchi Gallery in January 1994.
Young British Artists III marked Saville’s first major art world premiere and proved instrumental in bolstering Saville's confidence as a young artist. “I am totally grateful to [Charles Saatchi],” she later reflected, “not just the money, but his act of faith. It built my confidence. I still can hardly believe it.” (The artist in conversation with Hunter Davies, Ibid., p. 21). The critical reception was both immediate and emphatic, with commentators lauding Saville’s audacious subversion of entrenched aesthetic conventions. Her unflinching interrogation of female corporeality stood in stark opposition to the prevailing cultural obsession with slenderness that had reached a fever pitch in the 1980s and early 1990s, rendering her canvases a visceral counter-narrative to the dominant visual economy of the era. Monumental canvases such as Plan (1993), Trace (1993–94), Strategy (1993–94), and subsequently Juncture (1994), elevate the unvarnished realities of flesh to centre stage, confronting the viewer with corporeality in all its unapologetic excess. In doing so, Saville directly challenges the pervasive cultural sanitisation of the female body, resisting the airbrushed ideals of perfection that have long dominated visual culture. “The fleshiness of women’s bodies is something that is never put on display in the Twentieth Century,” Saville noted. “It’s always airbrushed or suppressed. I’m trying to do it with a certain sympathy and emotion” (Ibid.).
Following the critical acclaim of her London debut, Saville relocated with her partner, Paul McPhail, to Bantam, Connecticut, where she undertook the Susan Kasen Summer Fellowship, an artist residency established by collects ors Susan and Robert Summer in a repurposed industrial building. During the residency, Saville produced Juncture and commenced the Closed Contact photographic series – monumental self-images in which the artist’s body is visibly compressed against sheets of plexiglass. This visual device and conceptualisation of spatial constraint and physical proximity is also central to Juncture, in which the voluminous figure – undeniably modelled on the painter – is similarly forced into the confines of the picture plane. Alive with modulations of tone, hue and translucency, the pinks, ochres, alabasters, and bruised mauves of the skin are rendered with forensic precision, yet the brushwork retains an urgent physicality, as if the act of painting itself mirrors the tactile presence of the body. Cropped with confrontational immediacy, the nude figure is seated in a contorted, yet curiously serene posture. The face is partially turned away, compressed into the upper left margin of the composition, while the flesh dominates the vertical expanse of the canvas. At once deeply personal and universally resonant, Juncture crystallises the tensions at the core of Saville’s project: between exposure and concealment, intimacy and monumentality.
Juncture undeniably resonates with the visual traditions of Rubens, Ingres, Schiele, and – perhaps most profoundly – Lucian Freud. While Saville has long acknowledged Freud as a formative influence, ever since her encounter with his work at the Hayward Gallery in 1988, her practice ultimately departs from his in both its conceptual architecture and its underlying ideological impetus. Like Freud, she renders flesh in all its unidealised materiality, yet as Mark Stevens observes, “Inside her rectangle, she gives up some control. She allows the figure some escape” (Stevens, Jenny Saville, New York 2018, p. 16). Freud’s gaze is heir to a tradition of male painters of the female nude – onto which established masculine ideals of beauty and (conscious or unconscious) fantasies of desire or domination have been projected. Departing from Freud’s intrinsic male gaze and commitment to working exclusively from life, Saville favours instead a broader array of visual references drawn from photography, art historical texts, and medical journals. In this regard, her practice aligns more closely with that of Francis Bacon, whose corporeal distortions were derived from a dense archive of visual material. Like Bacon, Saville internalises the aesthetics of the photographic, channelling a distinctly contemporary sensibility shaped by the saturation of two-dimensional media. In Juncture, the dramatically cropped framing, heightened contrasts of light and shadow across the skin, and the abbreviated treatment of physiognomic features all suggest the mediation of the camera’s lens. This integration of photographic strategies into the language of oil painting situates Saville’s work in a compelling tension between historical continuity and present-day relevance.
Rooted in feminist theory and the discourses first encountered during her formative studies in Cincinnati, Saville’s practice finds critical alignment with artists such as Cindy Sherman, whose interventions into archetypal femininity dismantle historical visual codes. Conventionally, women have been the object of the gaze and have not been permitted to look, especially in the history of the nude portrait; at the Royal Academy for example, women were not even allowed access to the Life Room until the end of the Nineteenth Century. On the cusp of the Twenty-First, therefore, Saville’s tremendous nude paintings explore what is it to be both observer and observed within a tradition that has been dominated by the male gaze. Within this context, Juncture exemplifies Saville’s commit.mes nt to figuration and the nude: a genre long conditioned by the objectifying male gaze, here reclaimed through a lens that foregrounds subjectivity, materiality, and the ideological complexities of corporeal visibility.
The Genesis of Saville's Figuration
Through this sensory immersion, Saville merges two art historical lineages: the classical nude and Abstract Expressionism. Her painterly excess recalls the gestural bravura of Lee Krasner and Willem de Kooning, particularly his late abstract canvases, and she frequently cites his assertion that “flesh was the reason why oil painting was invented” as a conceptual touchstone. Linda Nochlin encapsulates this hybridisation of art historical paradigms when she famously likened Saville’s aesthetic to “a Sargent [having] mated with a de Kooning before our eyes” (Jenny Saville: Migrants, 2003, p. 11). Indeed, Saville’s brushwork often operates at the edge of sculpture, what Simon Schama has described as “creating pigmented human flesh” (Schama, Ibid., p. 124). In Juncture, these painterly swipes and impastos coalesce into a tantilising anatomy of flesh, in which the body becomes a site of spectacle.
At its core, however, Saville’s project is one of flesh: its materiality, mutability, and visibility. Her mastery of oil paint – its chromatic range, viscosity, and tactile responsiveness – enables her to render the surface of the body with extraordinary fidelity. Each passage of paint accumulates to form skin rendered in exhaustive detail: stretch marks, folds, dimples, and the topography of fat, muscle, and bone are articulated with a palpably sculptural intensity. In works such as Juncture, the sheer physical scale compounds this effect, immersing the viewer in a terrain of flesh that oscillates between hyperrealism and abstraction. At close range, figuration disbands into a field of gestural marks; paint asserts itself as both medium and metaphor. This is the paradox of Saville’s practice – what she has described as an “intimacy through scale” – where monumental canvases yield an unexpectedly close and enveloping encounter. As she observes, echoing the experiential dimensions of Mark Rothko’s colour fields: “I want paintings to almost surround your body when you stand very close to it… the colour hums and vibrates through you – it almost wraps around you. It’s a child-like feeling” (the artist quoted in: Martin Gayford, Jenny Saville: Territories, Gagosian Gallery, 1996–97, p. 31).
Saville has arguably done more to revitalise the traditional genre of the female nude than any artist in recent.mes mory. Described by Simon Schama as a “destroyer of false fetishes,” her paintings stage a full-throttle spectacle: monumental depictions of the female form that are visually commanding, unapologetically corporeal, and imbued with a fierce vitality (Simon Schama, “Interview with Jenny Saville” in: John Gray et al., Jenny Saville, New York 2005, p. 125). Today, Juncture resonates with renewed urgency. Its defiant celebration of flesh, scale, and physicality confronts the increasingly pervasive visual culture of digital self-presentation, where youthfulness, symmetry, and surface perfection are relentlessly pursued. Juncture demands not simply to be viewed, but to be confronted, inhabited, and felt. Though painted over two decades ago, Juncture stands as a profoundly contemporary image – one that not only critiques prevailing ideals of bodily perfection but offers a profoundly contemporary image – one that is rooted in traditional painting.
Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting | Exhibition Trailer
