Jenny Saville’s monumental Shadow Study stands as test.mes nt to Saville’s unrivalled painterly abilities. Simultaneously beautiful yet almost violent in its execution, stoic yet fragile, the work shifts compellingly from loose and brazen brushstrokes, to nuanced and scrupulously applied paintwork, offering a deeply evocative and poetic contemplation of the human condition. A work on paper that truly reads like a painting, Shadow Study confronts the viewer with a deeply intimate portrait rendered on an immersive scale. Nowhere are the artist’s painterly abilities and rich, pictorial vocabulary more evident than in this highly emotive and psychologically charged portrait of Saville’s anonymous sitter.

The present work offers a raw and immediate glimpse into the artist’s mature style of painting. The late 2000s were a significant period for Saville: she gave birth to her first child in 2007, the very year the present work was executed, followed closely by her second in 2008, and has spoken extensively on how her experiences of pregnancy and motherhood have profoundly impacted her artistic practice: “Making flesh in my body and the animalistic nature of giving birth affected my view of nature”, she has stated; “The simultaneous realities I’ve been trying to generate in my work over the past few years, the strata and layering, came about through drawings I made after having children. It opened out a new way for me to create space and movement” (Jenny Saville in conversation with Sally Mann in: Exh. Cat., New York, Gagosian Gallery, Jenny Saville, 2018, p. 30). Composed from slowly-layered, tactile swathes of paint, Shadow Head is indeed imbued with a vital and kinetic dynamism. Hovering elusively between figuration and abstraction, the paintwork of the portrait threatens to dissipate and unfurl. As broad, haphazard brushstrokes dissolve from a cheekbone into biomorphic shapes, an eyebrow into an impasto smear, the work is rendered as both self-consciously painterly and powerfully humanistic.

With her mouth slightly ajar, Saville’s subject gazes down at the viewer. Painted with an almost unnerving photographic reality within a tumult of expressive and muscular painterly marks, her eyes are the magnetic epicentre of the composition. Emerging from the surrounding layers of swirling paint, they appear electric yet slightly glazed over, as if caught in the liminal realm between outward and inward contemplation. In this sense of push and pull, back and forth, past and present, the subject’s gaze becomes a metaphor for one of Saville’s greatest interests: the vast impact of art history on contemporary painting. Through her visceral practice of vigorously layered paint, Saville contends with the magnitude of art history as a force that is at once inspirational and overbearing. Both self-consciously and subconsciously, her art draws heavily on the great masters of the past, most notably Rembrandt and Titian, whilst engaging with one of the most eminent painters of the Twentieth Century, Francis Bacon. Renowned for his raw and emotionally charged paintings, executed with sweeping, gestural bands of impasto paint, Bacon often transposed his own likeness onto his portraits of other people. This lingering sense of self is similarly evoked in Saville’s portraiture, and indeed Shadow Study shares a compelling affinity to her more recent Self-Portrait (after Rembrandt) from 2019. Juxtaposed against the rich physicality of the paint, the eyes and mouth of this self-portrait have been rendered with a striking verisimilitude that is analogous in intensity to the features of the present work.

Saville’s paintings often start out entirely abstract: throwing, spreading and smearing paint onto the surface, she subsequently begins to mould and sculpt her compositions into meaty, fleshy, figurative forms. Her role becomes analogous, in this sense, to that of a plastic surgeon, who similarly sculpts flesh for a living. Indeed, amongst the copious source imagery filling her studio space are photographs of reconstructive, cosmetic, and gender reassignment procedures. Saville has long been fascinated by invasive surgeries, and her practice incessantly explores contemporary society’s obsession with body image. Capacious and corpulent, even verging at t.mes s on violent and frenzied, her paintings challenge societal notions of beauty and femininity. Born in Cambridge in the UK in 1970, Saville came of age in the ’80s at a t.mes when body regulation and the diet industry were on the rise. Developed out of an era where women were fed the message that skinny was synonymous with beautiful – that smaller, thinner and lesser equalled better – Saville’s artistic output was greatly influenced by this strain of contemporary culture. As if in search for an antidote, her colossal paintings refuse to be contained or confined. With their rich, thickly painted overspill of fleshy, female corporeality, they are driven by an almost overwhelming intensity of force.

Captivated by the comparable characteristics of paint and skin, Saville seeks in her portraits to explore and exploit the tactile and visceral qualities of both her medium and subject matter. Cropped and enlarged to a magnificent scale, Shadow Study flits enigmatically between poignant portrait and monolithic selfie, majestically encapsulating the most noble and profound sent.mes nts of one of the most important artists of the Twenty-First Century.