HOUSTON, TX.- This exhibition, the first major museum presentation of Argentinian artist Analia Saban, surveys her last decade of practice through 30 works that explore everyday objects through unconventional usage of materials.
Surveying art history as if it were a ‘murder scene,’ she peels back (researches, deconstructs, reconstructs) layers of material histories and subject matters in search of new directions and possibilities. Saban’s initial project included tracing and annotating paint strokes of existing paintings in an analytical process that culminated in literally stripping pictures of their material substance and iconography, and culminated into a rolled up ball of colored strips of painted fabric from a plethora of unraveled paintings.
Stripe Hand Towel, Bag with Canvas, and Fitted Bed Sheet, all 2011, chart her experiments with acrylic paint cast into viscerally affecting simulations of common household objects such as towels, sheets and plastic bags attached to or containing a canvas. In her 2010-12 Decant and the more recent Bulge series (begun 2014), encaustic paint forms swelling bodies protruding from their support. Applied to canvas by pouring hot encaustic paint into plastic bags that are peeled away when the medium has cooled off and hardened, these encaustic masses proudly display the marks of their prior aggregate state as both their subject and form.
In her Draped Marble series (begun in 2014), marble is broken, glued and fastened to exquisitely crafted wooden sawhorses to evoke folded towels left out to dry. Recalling Saban’s earlier works in cast acrylic, these sculptures displace classic associations of material and application both within art history and consumer culture.
Currently working across painting, drawing, sculpture, and photography, she uses the constituent parts of each as her very subject matter. Creating dialogue between media’s historically defined conventions and their manifestations within the anatomy of individual artworks, her work is deeply inscribed in the ongoing process of conditional evolution and boundary-pushing renegotiation of the possibilities of media-based practices. What contributes to the uniqueness of her approach is a decidedly feminist sensibility, the frequent inscription of her physical and psychic self, and a good dose of wry humor.
Born in 1980 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Saban currently works in Los Angeles and lives in New York City. 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. The artist has exhibited extensively at institutions worldwide, including National Museum of Norway, Oslo; Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena, CA; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Gemeentemuseum, The Hague, The Netherlands; deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, MA; MARCO Museum in Vigo, Spain; among others. Her works are represented in the collections of the Hammer Museum at UCLA, Museum of Contemporary Art, and Los Angeles County Museum of Art in Los Angeles; Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College in New York; Norton Museum of Art in Florida; Centre Pompidou in Paris, and Fundación Proa in Buenos Aires.
