Internationally acclaimed artist Jenny Saville (born 1970) was a central member of the Young British Artists and the sole figurative painter to participate in the legendary exhibition Sensation at the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 1997. For over three decades, Saville has explored the centuries-old tradition of representing the human body, with her figures occupying an ambiguous zone between idealization and deconstruction. Drawing inspiration from the annals of art history – from Old Masters such as Leonardo and Raphael through to Egon Schiele, Picasso, Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud – hers is a painterly practice defined by physicality, carnality and the interplay between new and old media.

Saville translates the traditional artistic gestures of these revered painters into a unique painterly language that is truly contemporary, with her work oscillating between the realms of figuration and abstraction. Like a sculptor with a brush, her figurative representations often begin as abstract color fields and thick coatings of paint, which gradually take on form and definition as the layers continue to build. With ancient or Christian iconography serving as the template for her compositions, for her choreography of space, figures and surfaces, Saville is an artist who through both technique and tribute has developed a hybrid canon of forms that can be read as a painterly renewal of history.