Analia Saban
Layer Painting (CMY): Still Life with Three Fish and One Vase (Abstract), 2009
acrylic and screen printing ink mounted on canvas
50 1/8 x 59 5/8 inches
ARTIST BIO
Analia Saban dissects and reconfigures traditional notions of painting, often using the medium of paint as the subject itself. Blurring the lines between painting and sculpture, imagery and object-hood, her work frequently includes plays on art historical references and traditions. Paintings expand to sculptural forms and sculptures are presented in two dimensions, using the process of trial and error with new techniques and technology. Her unconventional methods such as unweaving paintings, laser-burning wood and canvas, molding forms in acrylic paint, weaving paint through linen thread, remain central to her practice as she continues to explore art-making processes and materials in relation to her daily experience. Dealing with issues of fragility, balance, technique and experimentation, Saban’s connection with everyday objects is at the forefront of her investigation of tangible materials and the metaphysical properties of artworks.
In her layer painting series, the artist embraces rather than suppresses this natural urge toward reminiscence. The imagery in her large, luminous paintings includes flowers, inanimate objects, and animals, together evoking Dutch still-life painting, Matisse cutouts, Pop art, and more. Her innovative process draws as much on printmaking, Photoshop, and sculpture as on painting. Using a palette familiar to every designer—the titles, too, are formed from combinations of the acronym CMY (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow) —Saban paints on a separate surface and then applies this translucent paint onto the canvas in layers, building yellow and blue into light-saturated greens; sculpting leaves, scales, and bright fields of color in the process. The results are sophisticated, at once as beguiling as a child’s color-by-number collage and pushing against accepted notions of painting, production, and reproduction.
Born in 1980 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Saban currently lives and works in Los Angeles. She received a BFA in Visual Arts from Loyola University in New Orleans in 2001, followed by an MFA in New Genres at the University of California in Los Angeles in 2005. Saban’s works are represented in the collections of the Hammer Museum at UCLA, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and Getty Research Institute, in Los Angeles; Blaffer Art Museum and The Museum of Fine Arts in Houston; San Antonio Museum of Art in San Antonio; Mead Art Museum in Amherst; Albright-Knox Art Gallery and Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College in New York; Norton Museum of Art in Florida; The Israel Museum in Jerusalem; National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne; Centre Pompidou in Paris; among many others.
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