Jenny Saville’s massive and meaty canvases put Ruben’s “rolling flesh” to shame.

Saville is known for her unabashed depictions of extremely plus-sized women so, if you see a large, fleshy lady staring you down from a 10-foot tall canvas in a museum gallery, then you’ve been “Saville-d”. In the Sartle dictionary, this means to have been totally weighed down by the visual and conceptual bulk of the work of art before you.

On the other hand, it’s a load off to know that men aren’t completely dominating the female nude anymore. Saville paints from a woman’s point of view, which is why her stuff is like nothing you’ve ever seen before in the art historical canon. She maaay come slightly close to Lucian Freud, whose work she was really into, but even so, her canvases are a far cry from the late Lucian’s. Saville’s flesh fetish goes way back into her childhood when she would check out her piano teacher’s thighs rubbing up against each other while she was playing Chopsticks, most likely. She would also get her jollies from watching the color palette of liver metamorphose as it cooked in a pan. Blech. Things came full circle when Saville was shipped off to Cincinnati from her British homeland for six months. It was flesh galore in the Midwest, as Saville says: “Lots of big women. Big white flesh in shorts and T-shirts. It was good to see because they had the physicality that I was interested in.”

In other words, this made for some juicy paintings that made who else but Charles Saatchi totally flip his sh*t. He bought out Saville’s entire senior show when she finished her postgrad, and she became known as one of the Young British artists (a group of art world rebels including Damien Hirst, Sarah Lucas and Tracy Emin). Saville also began observing plastic surgeries during her time in New York. Before ladies awaiting lipo would go under the knife, they would have markings on their bodies where the incisions were tp be made and these turned Saville on enough to make paintings of them.

Lots of people, whether they’re giddy about Saville’s work or repulsed by it, are still trying to figure out what it’s about...even though it seems so straightforward. There are feelings regarding these paintings that range from theories on the male gaze to skinny-shaming to flesh-celebrating to just plain “whoa”. We here at Sartle concur with the “whoa” theory.