Analia Saban
Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1980
Analía Saban held a video camera for the first time at the age of 11. In that early memory, the image returned by the camera's viewfinder is already considered an art form to her. As part of her education, she studied Visual Arts at Loyola University New Orleans and completed an MFA in New Genres at UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles). A student of Paul McCarthy and John Baldessari, from the onset of her career, she already began to nurture her interest in the history of matter, especially textiles. Her exploration broadened when she decided to experiment with the processes that lie between the handmade, the technological, and the industrial.
The structure of the painting, its ambiguous limits when combining different materials, and the ways of interacting with the canvas accentuate the hybrid character of her work. Painting becomes a subject in itself, not as a totalizing issue but as a starting point to understand how historical traditions converge in contemporary experimentations. Her pieces, at times, resemble sculptures, tapestries or furniture, props, objects of everyday life. Saban weaves and unweaves the inherited notions of art to expose processes, research, and, sometimes, even unanswered questions.
In her process of experimentation, time and space converge in the balance of material fragility, where gravity becomes tangible: a marble slat, folded as if it were a simple cloth; a handmade fabric, pressed by industrial acrylic paint; a canvas that becomes a sheet of metal and stone. Materiality mutates at Saban's demand to mislead, refute, and transform. Technology is at the center of the debate in these pieces, where the culture of image consumption, the art system, new forms of representation, and the lack of boundaries between the physical and digital worlds are explored.
Saban currently lives and works on the outskirts of Los Angeles, where she produces work that has been exhibited in galleries around the world, such as Tanya Bonakdar and Sprüeth Magers, and is part of the holdings of the Hammer Museum, the Tate Modern, and the Centre Pompidou, among others.
