Angela Santana paints the female body as it has been pictured and consumed, from the oil-painted nudes of art history to the relentless scroll of online imagery. Her large-scale canvases pull classical forms toward abstraction, holding the permanence of oil paint against the throwaway pace of the screen. Her work is held in private and public collections internationally, has been shown alongside Picasso and Rodin, and has appeared at the Istanbul Biennial, Art Basel, and in solo presentations at Saatchi Yates, London and now in the group show A Kinetic Negotiation at Homecoming Gallery.
Her studio in New York, though, sounds less like a battleground than a garden. Trees press against the windows. She talks about painting outside on rolls of paper as a child, about a dried Echinacea flower she picked up on the High Line that is now putting up seedlings on her windowsill. She mentions a Robert Mapplethorpe monograph she has owned since she was seven. Inside the work there is friction: fast marks against slow execution, the alluring against the unsettling, what she calls ‘Umami’.