The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth Presents FOCUS: Analia Saban, March 30 - May 12, 2019

The FOCUS series is organized by the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and features three solo exhibitions each year. Started in 2005, this series is committed to introducing visitors to new and emerging artists gaining worldwide acclaim as well as exhibiting esteemed mid-career artists previously under-recognized in the region. The FOCUS series is organized by Associate Curator Alison Hearst. FOCUS exhibitions are open to the public and are included in general Museum admission.

Los Angeles-based artist Analia Saban (b. 1980, Buenos Aires) takes traditional artistic media, such as paint, marble, and canvas, and pushes their limits in inventive ways that merge scientific experimentation with artmaking. In her Draped Marble works, Saban bends slabs of marble to the brink of destruction. Arced over walnut sawhorses, the marble appears fragile and pliable. Saban's marble works were influenced by the billowing fabrics rendered in the same material by Renaissance sculptors, such as those in Michelangelo's Pietà, which motivated Saban for their ability to transform "the hard into the flexible, the rough into the polished, the strong into the fragile."

Saban also uses paint as a sculptural element to explore the physical properties and boundaries of the medium. For her FOCUS exhibition, Saban presents all-new works, including tapestries and paintings based on the geometric patterns of computer circuitry. In the Tapestry series, she uses a traditional loom to interlace linen with nontraditional weaving materials, such as dried paint and copper wire, to reveal a motif based on the matrixes of specific circuit boards that revolutionized computer technology. Such work emphasizes a connection between digital and analogue methods of art production and underlines the tension, as well as interconnectedness, of the handmade and machine-made underpinnings that exist in our everyday surroundings. In her canvases, Saban also uses a loom to weave dried brushstrokes of acrylic paint within the linen's wefts and warps, subverting the custom of paint on canvas to create works that hover between paintings and objects. Often engaging sculpture, painting, photography, printmaking, and textiles in a single piece or series, Saban blurs the distinctions between media, questioning the material and conceptual boundaries of an artwork while revitalizing the notion of what art, or the process of making art, can be.

Analia Saban received a BFA in Visual Arts from Loyola University in New Orleans in 2001 and an MFA in New Genres at the University of California in Los Angeles in 2005. Her work has been exhibited widely both nationally and internationally and has been included in exhibitions at Qiao Space, Shanghai; Blaffer Art Museum, Houston; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; KIOSK, Ghent; deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, MA; and Palais de Tokyo, Paris, among others. Saban's works are represented in the collections of the Hammer Museum at UCLA; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College, New York; Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach; Centre Pompidou, Paris; and Fundación Proa, Buenos Aires.

Support for the 2018-2019 FOCUS exhibition series is generously provided by Frost Bank.

Acquisition

At the conclusion of the FOCUS season in the spring, one work or group of works from each exhibition is held for the annual Purchase Meeting. During this event, members of the Director's Council vote to determine which work will be recommended for acquisition by the Modern, thus contributing to the Museum's permanent collection and shaping its cultural footprint. To learn more about how to deepen your relationship with the Modern and the FOCUS program through membership and to be a part of the acquisition process, please call Allie Nikolaisen, Director of Development, at 817.840.2177 or e-mail development@themodern.org.

For a checklist, high-resolution images, or to schedule an interview, please e-mail kendal@themodern.org.