ART CITIES:London-Analia Saban

Analia Saban has gained renown for work that playfully carves open the conventions of photography, painting and sculpture.Interiors,her exhibition evokes an array of ideas about how genre and media affect our perception of different artworks, and vice versa. Using the constituent parts of her media as her very subject matter, Saban constructs a dialogue between the conventions that delineate various genres and the manifestation of these characteristics in the anatomy, or “interior”, of individual artworks.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Spruth Mager Gallery Archive

In the gallery, Claim (from Chesterfield Sofa) (2014) appears at first glance like two objects a sofa and, with a sly nod to that interior-decorating cliché, the painting above it in matching neutral colours. But the work is in fact a single, integrated sculpture, with both objects unified by the large piece of canvas that they share. The canvas spreads and grows from the paradoxical mood of this work extends to Draped Marble (Fior di Pesco Apuano) (2015), where a thin slab of marble hangs from a pristine sawhorse as if it were a wet towel. Cracking where it folds, yet just maintaining its form, the marble fails to live up to its essence as a material prized for hardness and permanence. The traditional still life is treated with similar irreverence in Fade Out (Bouquet of Flowers, in Ten Steps) (2015). An elegant line drawing of flowers is repeated ten times to create a polyptych. With repetition the image becomes increasingly distorted: as the viewer moves from left to right, the lines in each drawing become heavier and darker, until the legible still life becomes obliterated by black ink. As an involuntary force appears to overwhelm the picture, Saban reimagines the still life as a machine-made abstraction. An element of time or evolution is suggested by the structure of the work, which the viewer can read either way: an abstraction reducing itself to a clear image, or an image giving in to entropy, becoming a nameless shape. Saban’s surgical treatment of her material extends to photography: she will drag a still-wet photograph across a textured surface, or scrape the emulsion off the paper. In Markings (from Paint Storage) (2014) Saban scrapes a photograph that depicts a shelf of paints before reapplying the emulsion to an adjacent canvas.

Info: “Interiors”, Sprüth Magers Gallery, 7A Grafton Street, London, Duration: 27/2-28/3/15, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat: 10:00-18:00, www.spruethmagers.com/home