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’.

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.

Angela Santana (b. 1986) is a Swiss-born, New York-based artist. Her work has been shown at the Istanbul Biennial (2025), Art Basel (Miami 2021 and 2024; Basel 2023), and in solo exhibitions at Saatchi Yates, London (2022; 2025), among others.