ART CITIES:Berlin-Analia Saban
Surveying art history as if it was a “murder scene,” Analia Saban plumbs the histories of painting, drawing, sculpture, and photography to challenge their limits and capacities by making the constituent parts of each medium the very subject matter of her inquiry. Saban is also committed to showing how every medium is material of this world.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Sprüth Magers Gallery Archive
Gender, labor, and social context haunt Analia Saban’s abstractions, exposing the ideological repercussions of what it means to go deep into the aesthetic properties and possibilities of any medium. Analia Saban’s solo exhibition “Pigmente” is on show at Sprüth Magers Gallery in Berlin. As the artist says “I use a spectrum of materials depending on what needs to be conveyed through the work.” A recent core interest for Saban has been an investigation into the history of paint formulas and how they have shaped art history. An example of this approach can be seen when Saban carefully removes a small section of yellow paint off the quarter panel of an SUV and reapplies it to raw linen, with both parts displayed side by side as one work. Despite the resoundingly modern appearance of the saccharine yellow car part, Saban has looked to the pre-industrial history of paint. The labor of removing the automotive paint and turning it into a pigment is not unlike the work of Medieval and Renaissance artists who constantly searched for the finest minerals to grind for their paints. In a more abstract way, this can also be observed in four works from the “Markings” series in which Saban delicately peels off and then reapplies the photographic emulsion of the surface of photographs to an adjacent white canvas, the pigment on the photograph is treated as a skin, surgically removed. Just as paint has been excised from a car part to produce a pigment, here an image of pigment is used to produce a mark and a painterly swathe or relocated text from the pigment bottles depicted in the photographs. In the “Graphite Cluster” and “Cochenille Cluster” series, she re-appropriates the techniques of encaustic painting. In “Graphite Cluster” it is rocks of graphite in their mineral form that protrude from the perfect sheen of the graphite powder/wax formula, and in “Cochenille Cluster” small plant-lice – and the pigment produced from them when dried and ground, are worked into the encaustic surface. Here, a constellation of the silver insects balances their powdered counterpart, which takes the form of a dried bloodstain. Pigment as both raw and processed is presented simultaneously, physically and metaphorically fusing together into the theme, support, subject and medium of the work.
Info: Sprüth Magers, Oranienburger Straße 18, Berlin, Duration: 7/7-2/9/17, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-18:00, www.spruethmagers.com
