Analia Saban
Wet Paintings in the Womb
March 28–May 19, 2007
Munich
Monika Sprüth and Philomene Magers are pleased to present the first solo exhibition of the Los Angeles-based artist Analia Saban in Europe.
A student of conceptual artist John Baldessari, her method of working is, as she puts it herself, both artistic and scientific. She scrutinizes the process of creating a picture—indeed, she looks for that very element which makes it a picture. In order to achieve this she breaks through the visual composition and explores the picture’s physical properties. In her earlier works, for example, she reduced works by Kandinsky, Miró, Matisse or De Kooning to individual strokes or dots, which she cut out, copied and rearranged. Taking another work, she separated over a hundred canvases—landscapes, still lives and portraits—into individual threads, which she then wound together to form an enormous ball of art, The Painting Ball. Although the picture itself initially seems to disappear, this allows the more fundamental aspect, the prerequisite for a picture’s emergence, to come to the fore.