There can be few nicer ways of passing a quiet moment than sitting outside the River Cafe in London on a sunny May lunchtime, reading the menu. And then reading it again, slowly, imagining every dish. It’s going to be a hard, hard choice.
So when artist Jenny Saville arrives, crisply dressed in a pearl grey sweater with buttoned-up grey shirt, we apply ourselves with minimal preliminaries, and it takes a while. “I only really come here for special occasions,” she says, with obvious relish. It is not until she has finally settled on the rocket and zucchini salad (with toasted pine nuts, lemon zest and pecorino, since you ask), and I reluctantly give up on the pizzetta with taleggio and nettles in favour of chargrilled squid, that we start to chat properly.
There’s so much to ask. Saville is a pre-eminently successful British artist, with extraordinary shows all over the world of her luscious yet often disturbing paintings of bodies and faces, frequently enormous, skewering norms of beauty and exploring the space between figuration and abstraction. She is a leading figure in the stable at Gagosian, the bluest of blue-chip galleries, and until two weeks ago she held the auction record for a work by a living female artist — in 2018 her 1992 self-portrait “Propped” sold at Sotheby’s in London for £9.5mn.