Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting
This book was published on the occasion of Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting, an exhibition organized in 2025 by the National Portrait Gallery, London, which traveled to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas. The largest major museum exhibition of Saville’s paintings in the UK to date and the first in the US, it brought together works from throughout the artist’s career, including many not previously shown or published. The exhibition traced the development of her practice since the early 1990s and featured large-scale oil paintings and drawings that explore the interplay of figuration, abstraction, and the historical traditions of portraiture, as well as recent portraits that interrogate the connections between the physical and virtual in our image-saturated age.
The volume reproduces the sixty exhibited works and includes numerous details and studio photography. Following a foreword by Victoria Siddall, the catalogue features illustrated essays by John Elderfield, Roxane Gay, Andrea Karnes, Emanuele Coccia, and Nicholas Cullinan that examine Saville’s technical and conceptual development and her integration of art historical allusion. It also includes an interview between Saville and curator Sarah Howgate exploring the roots of the artist’s methodology and discussing her work’s key imagery and influences.
Publisher: National Portrait Gallery
Publication date: 2025
Contributors: Emanuele Coccia, Nicholas Cullinan, John Elderfield, Roxane Gay, Sarah Howgate, Andrea Karnes, Victoria Siddall
Designer: Peter Willberg
Printer: Gomer Press, Ceredigion, Wales
Format: Hardcover
Dimensions: 9 3/4 × 12 inches (24.8 × 30.5 cm)
Pages: 208
Language: English
ISBN: 978-1-85514-594-8
