Made In L.A. is coming to the Hammer, Barnsdall Park, LAXART, and billboards around town on June 2 and will showcase sixty emerging, under-recognized Los Angeles artists–one of which will be voted to win a $100,000 prize. In order to help you make an educated vote this summer, we’re counting down to Made In L.A. by showcasing each artist participating in the biennial.

Analia Saban is a visual artist whose work goes into sculpting and screenprinting all with an eye on painting. She’s an ironic deconstructionist, if you will.

Saban’s work is very, very clever and almost jokey in the sense that it pokes fun at the process of making a painting and looking at a painting. She very often takes paintings apart to redisplay them or reorient them in a clever way. Her work The Painting Ball (48 Abstract, 42 Landscapes, 23 Still Lives, 11 Portraits, 2 Religious, 1 Nude) sees her having turned multiple paintings into yarn-like strings, which she layered into a giant ball of paintings. Similar works include Guernica (Reinterpreted) sees Picasso’s masterpiece taken apart and turned into planks, stretcher bars, and a ball of canvas as well as Cotton Canvas Thread from a 7.5 ft-wide Landscape Painting which shows a sliver of a 7.5 feet landscape, both of which display paintings but not paintings.

She also uses other techniques to display this same concept. One particularly hilarious one is where she takes wet oil paints and vacuum seals her work onto a surface, making funny, self-referential pieces like NOT DRY and Fried Egg, below. She also has taken to showing how paintings are made by adding in arrows and numbers of strokes, creating a fine art “paint by numbers.” She also plays with screenprinting and painting, often blurring images by imperfect screenprint techniques that look like images that need heavy sharpening. Her most recent work includes very basic paint plays where she pools and sculpts paint into work, like Representation Of An Apple which sees an apple made of paint and Decant (White) #1, which decants an entire container of paint which pools at the bottom of the work.

Saban’s art is very, very funny while being fine art and super serious. You’d think that artists would have already exhausted ideas of how to deconstruct artwork…but they haven’t! Saban, along with a few of her Made In L.A. peers, that there is still a way to poke fun at art and the artistic process that have yet to be done. We’re thinking she’ll be bringing one of her newer painting sculptures to the show, which will be hilarious if she’s exhibited next to someone who is a traditional fine artist.