Analia Saban Gallery

May 15, 2024

Analia Saban's work blurs the distinctions between mediums, employing elements of painting, sculpture, photography, printmaking, and architecture in a way that deconstructs and revisualizes the very process of art-making. Her work often probes the condition of contemporary painting, inspired by her realization during art school that her peers in the painting department were the most financially successful. For example, in an early series of works Saban unraveled a painted canvas and re-wove the threads into scarves, and rolled them into a "Painting Ball". In another work, she emptied one hundred and ten pounds of paint onto a stretched canvas, which then sagged and bent, and would, over time, entirely break the canvas and frame. Her techniques have been described both as scientific and as archeological, due to Saban's curiosity and awareness of the larger social implications of her material, object-based inquiries.

If Saban's project emerges as one of topological ambiguity, it is because of her decision to produce undecidable objects, artworks that mess with the protocols of media determinacy and tactics of representation. With painting, photography, sculpture, the readymade, the trompe l'oeil, and abstraction alternately shifting and superseding each other — this ambiguity is grounded in a continuous re-inscription of the rhetoric of painting's death, a narrative of catastrophe that has long overcome hyperbole and is comfortable with its own taming.

Her work has been included in solo exhibitions internationally at Modern Art Museum Fort Worth (2019), Qiao Space, Shanghai (2017–18), Blaffer Art Museum, Houston (2016), and Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena (2014). Recent group exhibitions include those at Museum of Modern Art, New York (2023), Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln, NE (2022), The Warehouse, Dallas (2022), Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA (2020), Marciano Art Foundation, Los Angeles (2019), Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2018), Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Aïshti Foundation, Beirut (both 2016–17). Her work has also been featured at Art Safiental 2018: Horizontal-Vertical (2018); NGV Triennial at National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (2017–18), and the first Made in LA biennial at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2012). Concurrently with Synthetic Self, Saban's work will be on view in two exhibitions at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art: Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction (through January 21, 2024) and Eternal Medium: Seeing the World in Stone (through February 11, 2024) along with Chosen Memories: Contemporary Latin American Art MOMA NYC (through Sept 10, 2023).Born in 1980, Buenos Aires, AR
Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA, US
M.F.A. in New Genres, University of California, Los Angeles, CA, US
B.F.A. in Visual Arts, Loyola University, New Orleans, LA, US