Saatchi Yates presents a new exhibition by Zurich-born artist, Angela Santana. The show will comprise a new body of work that redefines the representation of the female body in contemporary art. Deeply engaged with the re-appropriation of canonical dimensions of the female form, Santana’s practice challenges traditional depictions of the female form, delving into themes of identity, transformation, and the ways the body is represented in our digital age.
Santana turns her attention to the internet and embraces it as her modern-day muse. With a practice rooted in the rejection of the classical, and conservative, Santana disrupts traditional approaches to painting by deconstructing digital media into hundreds of layers and reimagining them through her large-scale oil canvases. Working with the mass of illicit images online, the artist observes the historically male oriented consumerism and depiction of female bodies, radically reorienting these age-old tropes though her own lens. Santana’s technique reimagines how we might present, witness, and digest the female nude, from a female lens existing within the realm of the digital age.
‘Though deeply engaged with the representation of the female body and the reappropriation of the traditional, canonical dimensions of the female form, Santana’s work extends far beyond the confines of flesh. Interrogating broader themes of identity, agency, and the metaphysical resonance of the body as a vessel for transformation, her practice unearths new dimensions of corporeality within a hyper-mediated, digital age.’
Bella Greenwood, Art Critic and Writer
Angela Santana, 15th January – 20th February 2024, Saatchi Yates, 14 Bury Street, St. James’s
Private View – Wednesday 15th January
About the artist
Angela Santana is a Zurich-born artist living and working in New York. Taking inspiration from New York female painting predecessors Cecily Brown, Joan Semmel, Dana Schutz, and Georgia O’Keeffe, Angela Santana’s series reconstructs the depiction and perception of the classical trope of the female nude. The series brings together a mass of intimate images of the female body that work to interrogate the subjugation of the male gaze, powerfully reconfiguring her subjects into protected and reimagined figures. Santana explores the intersection between the fast-paced consumption of the online world and women’s representation. Santana’s technique in this series disrupts classical approaches to oil paint through her process of layering and radically reconstructing digitally composed artworks before painting them. Her works reimagine how we might present, witness, and digest artworks depicting the female body, rejecting a classical and male-dominated lens.
