Analia Saban, the first solo museum survey of Analia Saban’s career, calls into question the very notions of painting, sculpture, drawing, and photography as valid art forms, challenging the limits and capacities of each medium by exposing the ideological repercussions for gender and labor that are embedded within. For example, The Painting Ball uses strips of fabric from unraveled paintings and rolls them into a sphere, while the Draped Marble series employs broken marble fastened to crafted wooden sawhorses, evoking towels left out to dry. As the artist insists on a speculative condition for her work within the context of media determinacy, sculptures such as these, together with the others on display, displace classic associations of material and application within narratives of art history and consumer culture.

Analia Saban
The Blaffer Museum
University of Houston
120 Fine Arts Building, Houston
Through March 18, 2017