Angela Santana’s Retrospective Show at Saatchi Yates [London]

Last June, Saatchi Yates in London presented the stunning exhibition of Swiss-born, New York Based artist Angela Santana. The exhibition brings together Angela’s body of work ranging from 2015-2022, seen together for the very first time! An empowering reinterpretation of the male gaze, Angela 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.

On her technique, and raw subject matter, Santana states: “By shifting the object to become the new subject, I highlight how, throughout history, images of women were often passive and pleasing”. Santana creates this very shift in her new exhibition by bringing us into a space of protected female erotic representation, that vastly contrasts passivity, and meekness. Her figures refuse to be contained, rather they take up space in their unabashed stature, flux, color and range.

Writer Whitney Mallet, notes on Angela ‘s bold subject matter: “Beguiling in their opacity, there’s an allure to the eerie sense of calm and a provocation made by their defiant refusal to be consumed as intended. But more than anything, these artworks function as a reclamation of feminine eroticism for an era of system error”.

ABOUT SAATCHI YATES
Saatchi Yates is a commercial gallery founded by Phoebe Saatchi Yates and Arthur Yates which opened in London’s Mayfair in October 2020. Located on Cork Street, the spiritual home of the modern and contemporary art market in London, with over 10,000sqft of exhibition space spread across two floors. Saatchi Yates represents and showcases emerging artists, staging largescale exhibitions on the ground floor gallery space, with the lower floor dedicated to presentations of blue-chip contemporary art drawn from leading private collections. Phoebe Saatchi Yates and Arthur Yates spent three years preparing for the gallery launch during which time they built an extensive network of collector and dealer relation- ships. Working alongside Charles Saatchi as an advisor, they have developed a gallery model to take the commercial art world in an exciting new direction.

Angela Santana Portrait.

For more info around the show, saatchiyates.com
interview with hypebae chatting about inspiration & Switzerland,
with Hero mag about the conceptual thoughts and more.

@angela____santana
@saatchiyates