Analia Saban
Interiors
February 27–March 28, 2015
London
Analia Saban has gained renown for work that playfully carves open the conventions of photography, painting and sculpture. Interiors, her third exhibition with Sprüth Magers and her first in the London gallery, 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.
In the large 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 stretcher, invading the interior of the room, perversely merging with the sofa. 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.