Jenny Saville

Born May 7th 1970 Saville lives and works in Oxford England and is a contemporary British painter and an original member of the Young British Artists.She is known for her large scale paintings of nude women.

She has been credited with originating a new and challenging method of painting the female nude and reinventing figure painting for contemporary art.

On October 5th 2018 Savilles ‘Propped’ (1992) sold at Sotheby’s in London for 9.5 million above it’s £3-4 million estimate becoming the most expensive work by a living female artist.

Her technique uses small brushstrokes to build up the painting and soften the image the finish of the painting is matte but doesn’t look ‘dry’

 “She found a way to niche gender studies within a late flowering of the grand tradition of the swagger portrait… Saville’s provocative twist was to extend the bravura technique and monumental scale of such painting to naked and isolated (or in some cases sardined) young women”. David Cohen

Saville works with oil paint in heavy layers giving a flesh-like appeal.Her mark making gives life itself.

Saville’s non-conventional look at beauty takes the traditional nude image into a way of making a statement about the body,gender politics,sexuality and even self realization.

Her works have been described as ‘depict distorted,fleshy and disquieting female bodies’ to create interest,confusion,questions and excitement. Saville’s style and subject matter has been compared to that of Lucian Freud. ‘I paint flesh because i am human’ she has said.If you work in oil as I do it comes naturally.Flesh is just a beautiful thing to paint’

“A confrontation with the dynamics of exposure… her exaggerated nudes point up, with an agonizing frankness, the disparity between the way women are perceived and the way that they feel about their bodies” Suzie Mackenzie

She experiments with the dual meaning of embodiment and what it means to be “feminine” or “beautiful” through the use of the distortion and “disgust”. The visual of disgust pushed people to the uncomfortable and forced many into the shoes of countless women in the Western world.giving some the decision to decide their own standard of beauty beyond society.

Jonathan Yeo

Born 18 December 1970 in London, England) is a British artist who rose to international prominence in his early 20s as a contemporary portraitist, having painted Kevin Spacey,Dennis Hopper,Cara Develinge,Damien Hirst,Prince Philip,Erin O’ Connor,Tony Blair and David Cameron  among others. GQ has called him ‘one of the worlds most in-demand portraitists’.He was educated at Westminster School.

His unauthorised portrait in 2007 of George W Bush, created from cuttings of pornographic magazines brought him worldwide notoriety, shown in London, New York and Los Angeles.

His paintings are included within the permanent collections of the National Portrait Gallery,London,The Laing Art Gallery,Newcastle,The museum of Natural History at Frederiksborg Castle in Denmark and the Royal Collection.

In March 2016, Yeo’s largest retrospective to date opened at the Museum of National History at Frederiksborg Castle in Denmark.A new series of paintings of the actor and model Cara Delevingne was unveiled at the museum as part of the exhibition. This series of portraits was made over an eighteen-month period and is concerned with image making and performed identity. Yeo said: “the way we manipulate and read self-portrait images, or ‘selfies’, in the last five years has far more in common with the activity of the 16th-century portrait artists and audiences than any art movement since the birth of photography”.A portrait of the former Danish Prime Minister, Helle Thorning-Schmidt, was also unveiled at the opening of this exhibition and will remain at the museum as part if its permanent collection. A new monograph, titled ‘In The Flesh’, was published by the museum to accompany the show.

Yeo taught himself to paint in his twenties while recovering from Hodgkin’s Disease. In the early 2000s, he became known for his contemporary realist portraits of well-known figures. His subjects include actors Dennis Hopper, Jude Law, Kristin Scott Thomas, Lily Cole, Nicole Kidman, Turner Prize-winning artist Grayson Perry, Savile Row tailor Ozwald Boateng, the former Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt, The Duchess of Cornwall and media tycoon Rupert Murdoch.In 2005, his portrait of Erin O’Connor was used to advertise London’s National Portrait Gallery around the world. The painting was used as the front cover of ‘500 Portraits’, a survey of the BP Portrait prize published in 2011.

Yeo was commissioned by the House of Commons as the official Election Artist for the 2001 UK general election, and he painted the leaders of the three largest parties. His triptych of Tony Blair, William Hague, and Charles Kennedy, entitled, ‘Proportional Representation’, was made up of canvases sized according to the subjects’ popularity.

In January 2008, Yeo’s official portrait of former Prime Minister Tony Blair was unveiled and struck a public chord with its clear Iraq war reference. It showed an older and wearier-looking Blair wearing a red poppy – a symbol of war remembrance for the British..

Between 2010 and 2012, Yeo created works based on cosmetic surgery procedures. He presents the faces of women in pre and post-operative states, as a counterpoint to the traditional portrait. This collection of paintings was the subject of two solo exhibitions, ‘You’re Only Young Twice’ at Lazarides in London  and ‘(I’ve Got You) Under My Skin’ at Circle Culture Gallery in Berlin.

Cindy Sherman

Cynthia Morris Sherman was born January 19, 1954 in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, the youngest of the five children of Dorothy and Charles Sherman. Shortly after her birth, her family moved to the township of Huntington, Long Island. Her father worked as an engineer for Grumman Aircraft. Her mother taught reading to children with learning difficulties

In 1972, Sherman enrolled in the visual arts department at Buffalo State College, where she began painting. During this time, she began to explore the ideas which became a hallmark of her work: She dressed herself as different characters, cobbled together from thrift-store clothing.Annoyed with what she saw as the limitations of painting as a medium of art, she abandoned it and took up photography. “There was nothing more to say [through painting]”, she recalled. “I was meticulously copying other art, and then I realized I could just use a camera and put my time into an idea instead.

 Sherman is an American artist whose work consists  of photographic self-portraits, focusing on herself in many different contexts and as various imagined characters.She works in series, typically photographing herself in a range of costumes. To create her photographs, Sherman shoots alone in her studio, becoming many roles as author, director, make-up artist, hairstylist, wardrobe mistress, and model

Her breakthrough work is often considered to be “Complete Untitled Film Stills,” a series of 70 black-and-white photographs of herself in many of the roles of women in performance media (especially arthouse films and popular B-movies). In the 1980s, Sherman used color film and large prints, and focused more on costume, lighting and facial expression.

In 1995, Sherman was the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship. In 2013 she received an honorary doctorate degree from the Royal College of Art, London

Jean Michel Basquiat

Born December 22, 1960 – August 12, 1988) Basquiat was an American artist of Haitian and Puerto Rican descent. Basquiat first achieved fame as part of SAMO, a graffiti duo who wrote enigmatic witty puns in the cultural hotbed of the Lower East Side of Manhattan during the late 1970s, where rap, punk, and street art merged into early hip-hop music culture. By the 1980s, his neo-expressionist paintings were being exhibited in galleries and museums internationally. The Whitney Museum of American Art held a retrospective of his art in 1992

Basquiat’s art focused on divisions such as wealth versus poverty, integration versus segregation, and inner versus outer experience. He appropriated poetry, drawing, and painting, and married text and image, abstraction, figuration, and historical information mixed with modern critique.

Basquiat used social commentary in his paintings as a tool for introspection and for identifying with his experiences in the black community of his time, as well as attacks on power structures and systems of racism. Basquiat’s visual poetics were acutely political and direct in their criticism of colonialism and support for class struggle.

Fred Hoffman hypothesizes that underlying Basquiat’s self-identification as an artist was his “innate capacity to function as something like an oracle, distilling his perceptions of the outside world down to their essence and, in turn, projecting them outward through his creative acts.”Additionally, continuing his activities as a graffiti artist, Basquiat often incorporated words into his paintings. Before his career as a painter began, he produced punk-inspired postcards for sale on the street. On one occasion Basquiat painted his girlfriend’s dress with the words “Little Shit Brown”. He would often draw on random objects and surfaces, including other people’s property. The conjunction of various media is an integral element of Basquiat’s art. His paintings are usually covered with text and codes of all kinds: words, letters, numerals, pictograms, logos, map symbols, diagrams and more.