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the YBAs) in the 1990s.
She was among them, along with Damien Hirst, Gary Hume, and others.
Shed just not seen anything quite like it back home in England.
So the art world has changed enormously.
Or thats how it was seen.
But shes is a painter of flesh, so why not the flesh of her flesh?
That was profound: to paint flesh at the same moment as I was building it in my body.
That became a real push of my creativity.
People will say, oh female creativity goes down when you have children.
But I felt a huge impulse to create work.
(Fortunately, Saville has been successful long enough that she can afford help.)
We dont know who made it, men or women, she says.
you’re able to have multiple limbs, multiple ways of being, lots of lines.
So it has got to merge and have a wholeness.
It takes a while, she says, to get to that sense of wholeness.
It is hours and hours, weeks and weeks, and months and months building it up.
Sometimes she just leaves things to sit fallow for months, until they evolve into something else.
This show is, in part, a response to the #MeToo movement.
A feeling of empowering women, she says, pointing around the room.
These women are real and meaty.
The art world is a different place from when I started out.
There were no female tutors at my college.
You didnt see womens work in museums that much.
Maybe at the lower curatorial level, but now we have female directors, she says.
Penises in art are still a problem, for sure, she says.
Collectors find it more difficult.
I had an epiphany in the art school library and said, Well, where are the girls?
So I gave up painting for a little bit, Saville recalls.
I started taking photographs and doing casts and I literally felt homesick in my body.
I just couldnt manage.
It was like my language had gone.
I couldnt manipulate the world.
I was wearing somebody elses coat, basically.
And out of that, one could argue, Saville created a female painting.
It gave me a language, she says.
Between traditional art history and more feminist theory.
I went from thinking it [the combination] was a weakness to realizing it was a strength.
I had no choice.
It was my language.
It wasnt fat is a feminist issue.
I just had people around me who were big, and I like the story of being that big.
The narrative of being that big is all in the body.
I didnt have to create anything other than that body.
Its a bit hard to imagine a man deeming it interesting enough to paint them, though.
Jenny Saville: Ancestorsis open through July 20 at Gagosian,522 W. 21st St.
