The Anatomy of Painting: Jenny Saville Arrives at the Modern in Fort Worth

“Flesh was the reason why oil painting was invented,” Willem de Kooning once claimed. Few contemporary artists have embodied that dictum as fearlessly as Jenny Saville. Her canvases—at once tender and confrontational—turn paint into living matter, echoing a lineage that runs from Titian and Rubens to Bacon and Freud, yet resolutely claim the female body as her own terrain. Rejecting both idealization and detachment, Saville reclaims the body from the objectifying gaze and redefines flesh as a site of consciousness.

Opening at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth from October 12, 2025, to January 18, 2026, “Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting” is the artist’s first major U.S. museum exhibition. Organized by the National Portrait Gallery, London, and overseen in Fort Worth by Andrea Karnes, the Modern’s Chief Curator, the show traces more than thirty years of Saville’s practice—fifty works that chart her uncompromising exploration of flesh, form, and perception.

Saville (b. 1970, Cambridge) rose to prominence in the early 1990s, when her monumental nudes disrupted conventions of beauty and representation. As John Elderfield writes, her paintings “compel our attention even when painful to see,” capturing the conflicted magnetism of looking and being looked at. Here, her dialogue with art history expands into the twenty-first century—where analog gesture meets the saturated, virtual body.

For Karnes—who has shaped the Modern’s curatorial program for over three decades—the exhibition is both a homecoming of scale and a meditation on how paint becomes presence. Installed within Tadao Ando’s concrete sanctum, “The Anatomy of Painting” amplifies the physical and psychic charge of Saville’s work, offering American audiences a rare chance to stand before paintings that seem, as Elderfield observed, “to breathe, bruise, and live.”

In the conversation with Whitewall that follows, Karnes reflects on the significance of this landmark presentation, Saville’s enduring dialogue with the Old Masters, and the transformative immediacy of seeing her paintings in person.

Jenny Saville and “The Anatomy of Painting”

WHITEWALL: This will be the first major U.S. museum exhibition of Jenny Saville’s work, following its presentation at the National Portrait Gallery in London. How significant is it for the Modern to host such a landmark show, and what does it mean for audiences in Fort Worth to experience it?

ANDREA KARNES: It’s deeply significant for the Modern to host Jenny Saville’s first major U.S. survey. She had a smaller show here in 2011, but this is grand scale. We’re so honored. Her influence can be felt on nearly every figure painter who has come after her. For Fort Worth audiences—and U.S. audiences more broadly—it’s a rare chance to encounter the scale, physicality, and emotional force of her paintings in person rather than in reproduction. It will be the kind of experience that simply doesn’t translate to a book.

WW: The exhibition will bring together around 50 works spanning more than three decades. What curatorial priorities have guided the Fort Worth presentation, and how has Jenny Saville herself been involved in shaping this iteration?

AK: Jenny was very involved, which was a pleasure. Our priority has been to show how she continually reimagines the body. Because we can start in the ’90s and come to the present, we move through all her iterations of the body and tell the story in a way that shows continuity but also change. I don’t like the word evolution because it implies progress; I prefer to say iterations—from the ’90s to now.

Jenny was eager to rethink the exhibition for the U.S. There are major works in American collections, and we borrowed eleven of them—adding works that weren’t possible in London. The NPG space is different from ours, and shipping logistics were also a factor. We changed the show by adding those loans, and Jenny was extremely involved and excited to shape the Fort Worth exhibition to a slightly different vision—putting works in conversation that are just as important as what was in London, but different.

WW: Saville’s monumental canvases and unflinching depictions of the human body have always carried tremendous impact. How do you anticipate U.S. audiences encountering these works for the first time on such a scale?

AK: In 2022 I curated “Women Painting Women” and borrowed Jenny’s Strategy from The Broad. Visitors were taken by it. I watched people be awe-inspired, uncomfortable, and in deep reflection in real time. I expect a similar response to “The Anatomy of Painting,” but stronger because of the breadth. It won’t be a single work—it’s a career-spanning experience. Looking across her practice, presenting the body in different lights, will have great impact. Rather than diluting it, the range will let viewers see the many ways she compels us to look at ourselves.

Paintings from 1990s to Today

WW: The show will trace Saville’s trajectory from the nudes of the 1990s to her recent fluorescent, twenty-first-century portraits. What continuities and transformations do you expect to come through most strongly in this survey?

AK: The survey highlights Jenny’s consistency and her transformations. Early works like Still—a U.S. loan from The Met—and Trace show the body in stark realism. Later works such as Cascade, Rupture, and Virtual fold in abstraction in ways that point to the virtual world. It’s another layer added to the more analog earlier paintings. Across the decades, the body remains the constant subject, but there are endless reconfigurations.

WW: Saville has always engaged deeply with art history, drawing on the Old Masters while reimagining figuration for today. How will the Fort Worth presentation highlight that ongoing dialogue between tradition and reinvention?

AK: Just like the body, art history is another continual thread for her. Blue Pietà in our show draws from Michelangelo but also connects to her Aleppo series—embedding the Pietà with contemporary sensibilities and notions of suffering politicized through war.

When I look at Drift, I think of Millais’s Ophelia: a head in water, passive, not returning our gaze. In Drift, she’s turned away, submerged in her own space—a reference to the virtual for me, being online rather than directly engaged.

“She’s both the inheritor of art history and a radical reinventor of tradition,”

—Andrea Karnes

We also have Suspension, a new work not in London: the body of a pig—one of only two paintings Jenny’s ever done without a human figure. It echoes Soutine. The carcass entwines beauty and abjection, yet for Jenny it also connects to humanity—pig parts are used in human medicine—so it isn’t purely abject.

Those examples show how she’s both the inheritor of art history and a radical reinventor of tradition. She makes everything her own.

Paintings as a Physical Process

WW: For Saville, painting is not only representational but also a profoundly physical process—layered, tactile, almost sculptural. How do you see this embodied approach shaping the visitor’s experience of the works in the Modern’s galleries?

AK: Her paintings are layered to the point of being almost sculptural—built up with a physical intensity; you can almost feel pigment carved in places. In the Modern’s expansive galleries, visitors will experience not only the images but the presences of the works. Because of that physicality, they occupy space and almost demand a bodily response. A painting can change a room—hers can change you from the inside. There’s an aura, and you feel it.

“Her paintings are layered to the point of being almost sculptural,”

—Andrea Karnes

WW: Saville’s works confront ideas of beauty, identity, and the body in ways that feel both timeless and urgently contemporary. What kinds of conversations do you hope this exhibition will open—within the museum, across Fort Worth, and in the wider U.S. art context?

AK: I hope it sparks conversations about how we see and understand bodies—about beauty, gender, vulnerability, resilience, and the shifting ways the body is imaged today. Fort Worth has diverse communities with many perspectives, and I hope the work resonates widely. Nationally, it reaffirms Jenny as one of the most significant painters of our time—sustaining figuration as both a mirror and a provocation to our moment.

That’s what great contemporary art does: it reflects who we are while urging us to see differently. Jenny’s paintings do precisely that. They remind us of the power of paint—of looking, of empathy, and of being present with another human body. I believe people will be deeply moved, and many will travel great distances to experience it.