Saban’s exhibition at Sprüth Magers Projekte, Wet Paintings in the Womb, presents new works from 2006 and 2007. She first paints canvases of various formats in oil before shrink-wrapping them. The paint is generously applied, sometimes boldly with broad brushstrokes, predominantly however with separate thick streaks and blotches applied directly from the tube onto a white background. Some of the works have representational motifs, executed in a simple, childlike manner. An eyeball guides the visitors into the exhibition; a clock makes reference to the office situated in the foyer. The thickly applied paint forms a relief-like surface under the shrink-wrap, for instance in Egg (2006); thick, shining hills rise up from under the plastic film. The paint, which is still wet, can be seen under this. The contours of the motifs become soft and tangible.

Other works concentrate more on the structural aspect, in the tradition of Mondrian or Malevich. They experiment with the relationship between canvas and paint. The 2006 works Green Line and Black Line exemplify this; the paint runs seemingly incidentally over the canvas before moving over its edges and spreading out. Saban succeeds in capturing this process of the movement of paint; the organic character of the liquid paint, however, is retained under the plastic packaging. The paint can still move when pressure is applied, which in turn changes the picture.

As the artist herself explains, this exhibition incorporates a number of aspects. There is the visualization of a process, both the process of creating a picture and the process of further developing representational motifs towards the abstract. With reference to the exhibition’s title, she is concerned with the relationship between the organic and the structural. The resulting picture—the wet paint changing its form—is as safe in its cold, hard shrink-wrap packaging as if it were in a womb, where life itself begins to evolve.