Artists

We have selected five of our favourite contemporary female artists whose work explores the human form.

Jenny Saville is a contemporary British painter and an original member of the Young British Artists. She is known for her large-scale painted depictions of nude women. Saville has been credited with originating a new and challenging method of painting the female nude and reinventing figure painting for contemporary art. Saville works and lives in Oxford, England In her depictions of the human form, Jenny Saville transcends the boundaries of both classical figuration and modern abstraction. Oil paint, applied in heavy layers, becomes as visceral as flesh itself, each painted mark maintaining a supple, mobile life of its own. As Saville pushes, smears, and scrapes the pigment over her large-scale canvases, the distinctions between living, breathing bodies and their painted representations begin to collapse. Saville has famously quoted “Human perception of the body is so acute and knowledgeable that the smallest hint of a body can trigger recognition.”

Lucy McRae is a science fiction artist, filmmaker, inventor and body architect. Her work speculates on the future of human existence by exploring the limits of the body, beauty, biotechnology and the self. McRae works across installation, film, photography, artificial intelligence and edible technology. She is regarded as a thought leader who is exploring the cultural and emotional impacts science and cutting edge technology have on redesigning the body. Lucy uses art as a mechanism to signal and provoke our ideologies and ethics about who we are and where we are headed.

McRae has exhibited at museums, film festivals, institutes such as MIT, Ars Electronica and NASA and science forums across the world. Selected major artworks have been exhibited at Science Museum London, Centre Pompidou and the Venice Biennale. She is a visiting professor at SCI_Arc in Los Angeles; and is recognised as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum. McRae encourages scientific conversation and has spoken at TED, Royal Albert Hall, Cannes Lion and Tribeca Film Festival. She is regarded as a pioneer who blurs the boundaries across art, architecture, design and technology with a healthy disregard for labels that limit interdisciplinary practice.

Ivana Basic. Through her work the Serbian artist renders the body as a dense and finite space of confinement and examines the conditions and consequences of that space, its boundaries, its matter, its durability and it's weight.

Fusing synthetic materials such as silicone and living materials such as wax and oil paint, Basic enfleshes hollow and bruised forms that are at once bodies and habitats. Residing in the liminal space between life and death these sculptural forms test the boundaries of “human minimality” while examining what constitutes the notion of “wholeness.” For the viewer, Basic’s work evokes both the repulsion and the beauty inherent to the pain and fragility of corporeality. Through the duality of her practice Basic negotiates the complex conditions of mortality and speculates on scenarios beyond death and singularity. 

Her recent shows include Nogueras Blanchard, Barcelona, Gallery Diet, Miami, Two person show with Antoine Renard, Gillmeier & Rech, Berlin,​ Martos Gallery, LA, RodBarton, London, 820 Plaza, Montreal, Canada.

Tschabalala Self (born 1990) is an American artist best known for her depictions of Black female figures using paint, fabric, and discarded pieces of her previous works. Though she uses mixed media, all of her works are on canvas and employ a "painting language." Inspired by works done by an African-American artist, Romare Bearden, Tschabalala Self creates collages of various items that she has collected over time and sews them together to depict black female bodies that "defy the narrow spaces in which they are forced to exist", which she derives from the history behind the African-American struggle and oppression in society. Self reclaims the black female body and portrays them to be free of stereotypes without having to fear being punished. Her goal is to "create alternative narratives around the black body". Much of Self's work uses elements from black culture to construct quilt-like portraits.

Yung Cheng Lin, also known as “3cm”, is an extremely talented Taiwanese photographer. She explores the topics of womanhood – sexuality, birth, menstruation, maturity, the obstacles in front of women and the expectations towards them in today’s society.

In sometimes disturbing and surreal photos, he succeeds in touching us deeply, make us stop and think. All this is done by using everyday objects, simple colors and the magic of light. And unlike many others who try to stand out by simply shocking the audience, Yung Cheng Lin gives us something more than that – the sparkle that evokes sensation of delicacy and rebellion, the sparkle of a true talent.