Jenny Saville

Jennifer Anne Saville was born on 7 May 1970 in Cambridge, England. She studied at the Glasgow School of Art from 1988 to 1992, earning a BA with Honours in Fine Art, and spent a term at the University of Cincinnati, where she took a course in women's studies that shaped her early thinking about the body.

She emerged alongside the Young British Artists, appearing in Young British Artists III at the Saatchi Gallery in 1994 and in the landmark Sensation exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts in 1997. Gagosian began representing her in 1997, and her first major solo exhibition with the gallery, Territories, opened in New York in 1999. Saville was elected a Royal Academician in 2007. A multi-institutional survey across five Florence venues followed in 2021, and 2025 and 2026 brought The Anatomy of Painting, her first major UK museum exhibition, at the National Portrait Gallery in London, its only United States venue at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, and a career retrospective at Ca' Pesaro in Venice. She lives and works in Oxford, England.

Saville is consistently described in institutional and curatorial writing as one of the defining painters of the body working today, credited with reviving large-scale figurative flesh painting within a contemporary, often confrontational register. Her rise was fast and closely tied to the Young British Artists moment: inclusion in Charles Saatchi's collection and the 1997 Sensation exhibition established her early, and the trajectory continued through a 2007 election to the Royal Academy and a run of institutional surveys from Florence in 2021 through London, Fort Worth, and Venice in 2025 and 2026. The recurring critical thread is the treatment of the body itself, scale, distortion, and surface, as the subject rather than a vehicle for allegory. No verbatim critical quotation from a named reviewer at a major outlet could be confirmed against original text for this profile, so none is reproduced here.

Saville's auction market is defined by a small number of very high-value results rather than deep, regular volume. Her record is Propped (1992), a self-portrait that sold for GBP 9,500,000 (about USD 12.4 million) at Sotheby's London on 5 October 2018, a price that made it, at the time, the most expensive work by a living female artist sold at auction. It surpassed her previous record, Shift (1996), which had sold for about USD 9.05 million at Sotheby's in June 2016. She has been represented by Gagosian since 1997, and that continuous, single-gallery relationship, paired with major museum retrospectives running through 2026, has underpinned sustained institutional and market attention.

No catalogue raisonne has been identified for Saville, and works are best verified through Gagosian, her gallery of nearly three decades, rather than through an independent scholarly authentication body. Her auction record is thin relative to her museum profile: a handful of paintings have driven headline prices, led by Propped in 2018, and that scarcity means any single result can move the perceived market more than it would for an artist with deeper repeat-sale history. The current run of major museum retrospectives through 2026 is the strongest available signal of institutional durability, and it is worth watching whether it translates into more frequent, better-distributed auction activity.