Analia Saban

b. 1980

Analia Saban is a Los Angeles-based contemporary, experimental artist, whose work blurs distinctions between mediums – employing painting, sculpture, photography, architecture, and printmaking. Saban uses unconventional methods such as unweaving paintings, laser-burning both wood and canvas, and molding acrylic paint forms. She has found a way to weave with acrylic paint, extruding it into ropelike strands, allowing it to solidify, and then working it directly into linen canvas.

She explores the art-making process itself and pushes the boundaries of specific materials to blur the distinctions between different mediums.  She has scraped still-wet photographic prints; she has unwoven paintings to create sculptural forms from their threads; she has sealed a painted canvas in plastic to preserve the look of wet paint; and she has burned paper and canvases with a laser.

Saban was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina and was marked forever by the 1992 bombing of the Israeli Embassy, which was close to her school.  “I didn’t get hurt but a lot of my friends had blood on them.  And I do think a lot of my work has to do with destruction but also fixing things, or trying to weave things – or keep things – together.”  She studied film and video art at Loyola University in New Orleans for her B.A.  For her master’s degree, she enrolled in the “new genres” program at UCLA where she studied under Conceptual artist John Baldessari and began subverting the materials of art history.

She said that she felt directionless during this time and questioned the fact that art dealers were only interested in seeing paintings when they visited art studios.  She collected some 127 paintings from thrift stores, from the rejected works of her fellow students, and from knockoff art from painting factories.  She unraveled each canvas, rolling the threads together into a single, thigh-high ball.  She showed this breakthrough work of 2005 in her graduating exhibition “The Painting Ball (48 abstract, 42 Landscapes, 23 Still Lifes, 11 Portraits, 2 Religious, 1 Nude).”  This work helped secure her first gallery show in Los Angeles and then with Spruth Magers Gallery in Munich in 2007.

Saban’s sculptural paintings combine organic and technological elements while exploring traditional notions about art through her reference to two-point perspective, closely associated with art created during the Renaissance.  Her “Erosion (Geometric Cubes within Circle: Two-Point Perspective with Guidelines)” is an acrylic painting on canvas.  However the canvas lifts away from its circular frame, giving the work a sculptural quality.  After she draws on the canvas and then applies paint, she puts the painting through the laser-cutting machine.  The parts of the canvas with the thickest layers of paint remain intact, while the areas with lighter applications of paint appear charred.  This gives the texture of the work a delicate, burned lace effect.

In Saban’s “Flare Up” series, she lays a stretched linen canvas flat and pushes paint through from the back.  The paint might bead up on the surface or it might form a kind of landscape.

Spruth Magers gallery in Los Angeles has shown her latest installation “Folds and Faults.”  This is a series of draped and folded concrete pieces that involved the bending of  a 1,000 pound slab of concrete in half without completely breaking it in two.  Saban sees in this work “a connection to earthquakes – the way they cause city streets to buckle . . . “

Her work is in the permanent collections of Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Hammer Museum, Museum of Contemporary in Los Angeles, and the private collections of the Rubells in Miami and the Marcianos in Los Angeles.  The inaugural show of the Marciano Museum featured three of her works.

More here.