“I believe that Jenny Saville is a genius,” said Cal Revely-Calder in The Daily Telegraph; and of the 45 works in this “stunning” retrospective at the National Portrait Gallery, there are “at least a dozen” paintings that confirm my view.
Born in Cambridge in 1970, Saville studied at the Glasgow School of Art and caught the eye of collector Charles Saatchi at her graduation show; he “bought her entire collection on the spot”. Since then, she has proved herself as one of our greatest figurative painters, renowned for her confrontational and densely textured depictions of nude figures, and for the virtuosic way in which she conjures the texture of flesh in her canvases.
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