West, London
Angela Santana
Angela Santana
Saatchi YatesSwiss-born, New York based artist Angela Santana presents a new body of work that redefines the representation of the female form in contemporary art. Known for her vibrant large-scale oil paintings, her work examines the historical representation and depiction of the female body and its ongoing impact. Embracing the internet as her modern-day muse, she observes the rapid consumption of images online, questioning power structures and biases that shape and distort perception. Santana’s multifaceted experimental artistic process breaks from tradition, using the permanence of oil paint as an antidote to the fleeting nature of digital imagery. She deconstructs and reconfigures the classical form towards abstraction, while questioning the status quo. "Santana’s work is grounded in a deep engagement with flux and impermanence, which she describes as “the only truth and constant”. This focus on movement and transformation underscores the kinesthetic energy present in her practice, where to create movement in her works is not to remedy pace, but to credit it as the underbelly of our social psyche. Santana reimagines the body as an endless terrain of becoming, a site where the history, identity, and desire coalesces into something resolutely alive, unyielding, and boundlessly transformative. Through this radical act of reclamation, her work does not merely reframe the body—it redefines it as a catalyst for rethinking the world itself." —Isabella Greenwood 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 painting reconstructs the depiction and perception of the classical trope of the female nude. Her canvases bring 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.