Jenny Saville in conversation with Claudia Schmuckli

Jenny Saville. A hand-to-hand combat with painting. Imagine entering an art workshop, where painting is living matter, flesh is surface, and identity is transformed with each brushstroke. Jenny Saville, a disruptive British artist, recounts her training starting from an almost Renaissance apprenticeship: as a child, she drew the same hedge every day, learning to observe how light and seasons change reality. This discipline, inherited from a strict academic education, soon collided with reflections on the representation of the female body, matured thanks to the encounter with feminist thought during a period of study in the United States. A real short circuit: how can a woman paint nudes without feeling crushed by centuries of the patriarchal gaze? This conflict became the driving force of her research: Saville wondered about the possibility of reconciling figurative painting with a new vision of the body, free from stereotypes of beauty and cultural impositions. In her early works, such as Propped and Branded, the canvas becomes a battlefield where the desire to represent the flesh and the need to break with conventions are challenged. Her experience in the operating room, where she observed plastic surgeons at work, led her to see the flesh as a material to be modeled, engraved, and transformed. Her brushstrokes become sculptural gestures: the paint becomes thick and intense, imitating the texture of cut, stitched, and marked flesh. Saville often uses her own body as a model, but she is also fascinated by the bodies of other women, by the variety of shapes, by the traces left on the skin by life, by surgery, by accidents. Her attention shifts to the vulnerability and strength of wounded flesh, to the gray area between beauty and repulsion, life and death. Through photography and drawing, she explores the possibility of multiplying points of view, superimposing bodies and lines, and dissolving the boundaries between identity, gender, and even between the living and the dead. Her move to Palermo, a stratified and mestizo city, gave her time to experiment and deepen her relationship with ancient history, female deities, and collective memory. In this phase, motherhood bursts into her work: painting becomes a celebration of creation and metamorphosis, of the multiplicity of bodies that are born, intertwine, and transform. Drawing takes on a central role, allowing her to capture movement, overlap, and the simultaneity of forms, as in a kaleidoscope of flesh and memory. In recent years, Saville has reflected on the perception of reality in the digital age, where identity and presence move between screens and real bodies. Her paintings become surfaces where layers of paint coexist, sections of reality that overlap like computer windows, playing with transparency, density, and erasure. For her, painting remains a space of absolute freedom: a territory where everything can be dismantled and rebuilt, where flesh and color challenge and embrace each other, always poised between fragility and power.