Jenny Saville

Known for: large-scale figurative painting of the body

Jenny Saville painted large-scale figurative works as a student at Glasgow School of Art that attracted Charles Saatchi's attention before she had graduated, and her subsequent paintings — enormous canvases of flesh in extreme close-up or distortion, addressing the physical experience of the body without idealization — established her as the most significant British figurative painter of her generation. She studied surgery and worked in plastic surgery departments to understand the physical reality of the body she was painting. Her Propped (1992) sold for £9.4 million at Sotheby's in 2018.