Jenny Saville, Passage

“I was searching for a body that was between genders. The idea of floating gender that is not fixed. The transvestite I worked with has a natural penis and false silicone breasts. Thirty or forty years ago this body couldn’t have existed and I was looking for a kind of contemporary architecture of the body. I wanted to paint a visual passage through gender — a sort of gender landscape.”

Jenny Saville, Stare

Against one of the studio walls is the study for a recent painting, Stare. Again from a newspaper cutting, it is a picture of a young girl, one side of her face a large birthmark. Saville is animated as she talks of the picture. How you can charge a painting, create tension. The sense of the blood underneath the skin, how the stain becomes confused with the shadow of the nose. What she calls the pathology of painting. “I have moved from the anatomy of the body to the anatomy of paint,” she says.

Jenny Saville, Rosetta