Out there
Jenny Saville’s 1990s breakout work with obese female bodies on supersized canvases – as seen on the Manic Street Preachers’ Holy Bible cover – were discovered by Charles Saatchi, who supported her for 18 months before exhibiting the results as part of Young British Artists III when she was 23. She has since sought other subjects whose appearance challenges the norm, including people fresh from cosmetic surgery.
Shock factor
The woman in this painting is a corpse, her face ripped open by a bullet. Beneath a half-shut eye, electric-blue bruises and rust-red dried blood animate her sickly pallor.
The skin we’re in
Hailed as an heir to Soutine, Bacon and Freud thanks to her fleshy way with paint and focus on mortal remains, the painter says she is interested in “extreme humanness”. This typically means a moment when physicality comes to the fore and bodies are reduced to meat.
Access denied
The work’s title, Entry, is double-edged. These eyes are no windows to the soul but glazed, the person absent. The skin has become a literal and obscene entry point, opening in a purple-black void of dried blood at the painting’s centre, which reveals nothing.
