Analia Saban
http://analiasabanstudio.com/Analia Saban (b. 1980, Buenos Aires, Argentina) currently works in Los Angeles and lives in New York. She received a B.F.A. in Visual Arts from Loyola University in New Orleans in 2001, followed by an M.F.A. in New Genres at the University of California in Los Angeles in 2005. Saban’s works are represented in the collections of the Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College; the Hammer Museum at UCLA, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Norton Museum of Art, Florida; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
The Argentinian artist Analia Saban (b. 1980) challenges perceived boundaries between artistic disciplines as well as the conception of painting as a singular work or choreographed set of actions. With subtle and playful irony, she responds to historical tropes such as action painting, the readymade, and the modernist canon by experimenting with history, language, and material. Whether using marble dust or vestiges of paint to smear the canvas or cutting-out canvases to suggest the erosion of painting, the artist insists upon the breaking down of boundaries between disciplines.
Using raw canvas, acrylic, oil, and crayon, Saban often builds up the surface of her canvases, expressing painting in a third dimension. In some works, the canvas becomes a vessel for holding paint, in others the paint acts as membrane or skin; in yet others, it is the departure point for an installation where the paint has been repurposed. It is rarely a place for pure representation or display. Her focus on object making as an accumulative process turns to deconstruction in her “laser-sculpted” works. Using a laser cutter on paper or membranes of acrylic paint, Saban carves away images in negative space. The simultaneous emphasis on erosion and reconstruction runs throughout her practice, as in One-Armed, Three- Legged Chair (with Coil Spring Rubbings) (2014), where she applied a new piece of canvas inscribed with crayon to emphasize the inner workings of a found, deteriorating chair. This oscillation between tearing down and building up is what makes Saban’s work so charmingly uncomfortable yet familiar, and is continued in the series especially created for Prospect.3 during a residency hosted by Loyola University, her alma mater, during the summer of 2014.