Angela Santana
Angela Santana (b. 1986) is a Swiss-born, New York–based artist renowned for her vibrant, large-scale oil paintings that critically examine and reimagine the historical representation of the female body, revealing its enduring influence on contemporary culture. Using the internet as a modern muse, Santana explores the rapid consumption of online imagery. She interrogates the power structures and biases that distort collective consciousness, utilizing the permanence of oil paint as a poignant counterpoint to digital ephemerality. Through an experimental process that pushes classical forms toward abstraction, she challenges the status quo to explore the complexities of the human condition. Santana's work is held in prominent private and public collections worldwide and has been exhibited alongside masters such as Picasso and Rodin.
Institutional highlights include New Voices from the Museum Collection at Amoca, Wales, and a group exhibition curated by Anthony White at Seattle Art Center Cannonball, alongside presentations at the Istanbul Biennial (2025), Art Basel (Miami 2021, 2024; Basel 2023), and solo exhibitions at Saatchi Yates, London (2022; 2025).
When did you first feel pulled to make something? And did you have any idea then what it was really about?
Even as a very young child, I loved nothing more than painting outside in the garden on endless rolls of paper. I always felt an absolute freedom to explore, to be completely immersed in the moment, free-spirited, and curious about the process itself.
Where does a painting live before it actually exists?
Every painting is a surprise, even to myself. The process really leads me, and I don't have any vision of the final work beforehand. That is what keeps me curious. I am constantly inspired to create; I notice colour combinations out in the wild and in the city that later, somehow, make their way into the compositions.
What does your studio look like right now? And what does that say about you?
It looks like a green oasis. Once the leaves come out on the trees, the studio feels like its own universe, even though I am in New York City. This sanctuary-like atmosphere lets me submerge myself in the artistic process while the city's chaos hums just beyond the leaves.
Is there anything in your process you couldn't work without? A material, a gesture, a habit?
My process is a dialogue between the immediate, rapid gesture and a more deliberate, meticulous execution: a productive friction between the fast and the slow. It starts with a digital composition. I only have one rule, which is to keep my initial fast marks, to let subconscious, unpolished fragments take root. Those unexpected disruptions then serve as the blueprint for a much more meticulous, physical translation, carrying that initial energy into the weight of the material.
What's something that genuinely changed you? A film, a record, a book, a place?
It is hard to pin down just one; it feels more like the sum of several visceral encounters. I have always been most affected by works that bridge the gap between an immediate physical impression and a deeper psychological weight. I think of Louise Bourgeois for the way she gives raw emotion a physical form; Eadweard Muybridge for his obsession with the mechanics of motion and the fragmentation of time; and David Lynch for the way he makes the subconscious feel startlingly present. Each of them shares a fascination with the tension lurking just beneath the surface, and that friction is exactly where my own process begins.
When was the last time something surprised you? And did you trust it?
A few months ago, while walking the High Line, I found a dried Echinacea flower discarded on the concrete. I took it home, and this spring decided to plant the seeds just to see what would happen. I am surprised that several seedlings have already emerged. There is something incredibly rewarding about seeing this transformation into something living and tangible.
If a total stranger to art walked into one of your shows, what would you want them to leave with?
I want them to encounter a state of Umami: a sensory experience so dense and layered that it refuses to be decoded in a single glance. My goal is to strike a specific kind of equilibrium, a point of friction where the familiar and the unsettling collide. Something incredibly alluring, yet indescribably strange. That irreverence creates a restless energy, a mix of joy and subversion that forces a reconsideration of the world around us.
What are the things you've just always kept around? The ones you'd never throw out?
I have been an art-book addict since I was a child. It started when I was seven, with a Robert Mapplethorpe monograph, a book that stayed with me long before I fully understood its weight. I recently saw those same photographs in person at the Gladstone Gallery in Chelsea, and they were absolutely sublime, and only reinforced my fascination with his work. I was surprised by how much they must have imprinted on me.