Analia Saban

Analia Saban was born and grew up in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She always knew that she wanted to be an artist: "This is what I was born to do,” she says.[1] Saban earned her B.F.A in Visual Arts from Loyola University New Orleans and her M.F.A in New Genres from UCLA.[2] She studied under the artist John Baldessari and now works in his former Santa Monica studio.[3]

Saban often works with materials in ways that confuse or subvert their typical meaning or use in studio art practice. She describes her method of working as artistic, scientific, and archeological,[4] due to her awareness of the larger social implications of her material and object-based inquiries. Of her work, Saban has said "I like to work as unconsciously as I can, letting ideas take over my production. I try to avoid “forcing” the creative process. I try to keep a constant level of experimentation, but sometimes I also have to sit, look at previous work, or experiments, or the empty wall, and wait.."[5] She seeks to redefine the traditional notions of painting by utilizing the medium of paint as the subject of her work.[6]

Some of Saban's more well known projects have involved completely unraveling a painted canvas and re-weaving the threads into scarves or rolling them into a "Painting Ball,"[7] bending slabs of marble or concrete and draping them over sawhorses,[8] and printing plastic bags out of hand-made cotton paper.[9]

She is the winner of the Norton Museum's 2012 "Rudin Prize For Emerging Photographers".[10]

Saban's work has been exhibited widely both nationally and internationally and are represented in the collections of the Allen Memorial Art Museum of Oberlin College, the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College, the Hammer Museum at UCLA in Los Angeles, Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, Norton Museum of Art in Florida, and Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

• 2005: Bit by Bit, Kim Light Gallery / LightBox Gallery (Inaugural Exhibition), Los Angeles, CA
• 2007: Wet Paintings in the Womb, Galerie Sprüth Magers Projekte, Munich, Germany
• 2007: When things collapse, Praz-Delavallade, Paris, France
• 2009: Living Color, Praz-Delavallade, Paris, France
• 2009: Light Breaks Out of Prism, Thomas Solomon Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
• 2010: Information Leaks, Josh Lilley Gallery, London
• 2010: Froing and Toing, Light and Wire Gallery, Los Angeles, CA[11]
• 2011: Grayscale, Thomas Solomon Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
• 2011: Dig, Praz-Delavallade, Paris, France
• 2011: Derrames, 11x7 Galeria, Buenos Aires[12]
• 2012: Gag, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York, NY[13]
• 2013: Datum, Josh Lilley Gallery, London
• 2013: Bathroom Sink, etc., Sprüth Magers, Berlin[14]
• 2014: Outburst, Galerie Praz-Delavallade, Paris, France[15]
• 2015: Backyard, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York, USA [16]
• 2015: Interiors, Galerie Sprüth Magers, London, UK[17]
• 2016: Paper or Plastic, Mixografia, Los Angeles, CA[18]
• 2016: Analia Saban, Blaffer Art Museum, University of Houston, Houston, TX[19]
• 2016: Analia Saban Is Broken, Gemini G.E.L., Los Angeles, CA[20]
• 2017: The Warp and Woof of Painting, Galerie Praz-Delavallade, Paris, France[21]
• 2017: Folds and Faults, Galerie Sprüth Magers, Los Angeles, CA[22]
• 2017: Pigmente, Galerie Sprüth Magers, Berlin, Germany
• 2017: Canvas on Paint, Qiao Space, Shanghai[23]
• 2017: Where We Start From, Gemini G.E.L., Los Angeles, CA[24]
• 2018: Punched Card, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York, USA[25]

The New York Times - "An Artist at Home on the Fault Lines" by Jori Finkel