Angela Santana is the Disruptive Artist Rethinking Female Nudes For The Digital Age

Meeting Angela Santana to discuss her new exhibition of reworked female nudes at Saatchi Yates is naturally quite intimidating. It’s not too often you encounter an artist among the vanguard of those challenging the dominance of the male gaze; it’s rarer still to meet one whose visual language is so distinct that she’s been credited with reinventing a medium for the modern age. Couple this reputation with a taste that’s so respected even her red lipstick has graced the pages of fashion magazines, and it’s clear to see why Santana has caught the attention of artists and collectors everywhere.

While there’s certainly an aura of celebrity that follows Santana through the art world, what is most exciting about the Swiss-born, New York-based artist is a method that she developed to reframe mass-consumed images of women in the media. Displaying this technique in her new show, Santana builds layer upon layer of oil paint over found images – think everything from beauty ads to erotica – until the originals are unrecognizable, transforming these pictures to create distorted yet powerful symbols of the zeitgeist.

In this stroke, the bodies on Santana’s canvases act as stand-ins for the collective experiences that both transcend and intertwine with the portrayal of women on the internet, in the artistic canon and beyond. They are an intentionally disruptive assertion that the female nude is about more than just beauty. 

Opening last week, Santana’s new show at Saatchi Yates is fleshy, abstract and distorted. Relics of found images exist beneath layers of oil paint – often nude, but with some vibrant and very digital-looking blues and greens in the mix. At times, her subjects are easy to make out, but at others, Santana’s careful warping of the original image means you must search among colossal bodies of flesh and colour for a fully transformed figure. A standout piece, Speaking in Tongues, comes to mind.

But rest assured, this is very much intentional. It’s through these transformed, deformed and layered compositions that Santana’s work poses a particularly important question: what is there to uncover by re-evaluating the images of female bodies speckled across our online worlds?

After the launch of her new exhibition, we discuss her status as one of the artists reshaping intimate portraiture, her fusion of digital and oil-based mediums and what she hopes audiences take away from her radical reworking of the female nude.

What drives your artistic process?

I'm always working with the female body and reinventing how the female body can be depicted. I’ve created my own technique, actually. I’ve always combined the digital brush stroke with my own manual brush stroke, even since art school. There’s something to be discovered, something to be explored when combining the two to really get a unique outcome and a very distinct visual language. So in a way, I've been perfecting this technique for many years and it allows me to come up with something new.

What does that method of transforming digital images into oil paintings look like?

I start with a digital thumbnail, a found image, something that exists in our cultural sphere, something from the mass of images that are thrown at us on a daily basis. Usually, it’s from where the female body is seen: makeup ads, erotica, anything that sparks an interest in me. Even if we don’t really question these images, they all want to sell us something. It's always an ideology or a product or just something.

Then I take them out of their original context, and I draw and paint layer over layer. The very first movement is actually quite a quick one, it’s basically shaping out the figure in rather quick brush strokes, and I think that energy can be felt sometimes. It's quite wild and raw and unleashed.

There’s definitely a feeling of movement.

I embrace movement because it lets you see something new every time. There's always something to be discovered and unfolded and the viewing experience is never really finished in that sense. You don't look at it and know it. You learn more by looking more. 

That ties nicely into the idea of “re-seeing” the women you represent, which is something you've mentioned in the past. What do you hope to convey in your reconstruction of the female nude?

I see these compositions as conveying something much bigger than just the body. They're symbols. It's not about getting a likeness of a person. It's not a portrait. It’s an offering of rethinking. It's using the body as a vessel for rethinking the world and how we've seen things. And it's playing with the familiar, but there's something that haunts you because there's something that's very unfamiliar and you have to engage with the image. I think that's when the invitation to rethink and reclaim is most clear.

But it's also about pushing against the familiar notion of how a female nude looks and has been depicted over and over in art history, which is usually very decorative. I was always interested in painting the female body, but I realised that I wasn’t satisfied with the outcome because I would only ask, is it beautiful or not? And that's not what I wanted. I wanted more from art. I think you can feel that sense of freedom in my compositions. And that they're not decorative anymore, they're just powerful.

How do you feel about being held up as a role model, as someone at the forefront of artists rejecting the male gaze and reframing intimate portraits of women?

It's interesting to talk about the female gaze or empowerment as a central to why I'm doing it, but also, I'm not about the gender thing. The female body does lend itself to this exaggeration and exploration, and it's very sensuous. On the one hand, I’m really celebrating that life and sensuousness, but in another way, I use the female body because it offers me the opportunity to talk about the world itself and this idea of impermanence. And that’s not really gendered, even though it's about the female body.

Why use oil, a relatively permanent medium, to explore that idea of impermanence?

It's two things. One, there's a long history of women being depicted in oil and by the big masters and I’m really linking to that. I’m taking something historical, but also very now, and working with the same medium to comment on what exactly is behind that lineage. But also, I like the medium because the contrast between oil and the fleeting nature of the digital realm is so stark.

There’s a digitality to your work. At certain points, oil almost emulates pixels, gradients and a smoothness that feels very digital. Is that an intentional nod to the digitality of your subjects?

They’re not necessarily pixels, but relics that emerge because of my initial use of very fast brush strokes. When I work through this layered process, when I overlay these elements, you see little relics of digital corners. And then you have these very soft blurs, which are very digital, but they can be translated so beautifully with oil. I think the medium lends itself almost naturally to translating the digital world.

You’ve previously compared your pieces to children: it's not about having a favourite, but about having anecdotes. Do you have a story that stands out from your current body of work?

It’s funny because when they leave the studio, they grow their own legs. And even from the beginning, it’s a collaboration between me and whatever the image wants to become. Pussy Footing has this aura that … people just stand in the queue and look at it. So, it's really rewarding when they grow their own legs and, in a funny way, those legs were already in the title.

What do you hope audiences take away from the exhibition?

I think it hits different notes, and it's not just one thing. It can be strange, it can be familiar, it can be extremely joyful, but there is this darker undercurrent that’s in the zeitgeist and I think that’s also reflected.

I also find it very rewarding to speak in a visual language and find that my intention has been translated so clearly by the audience. I put my ideas into a visual medium and the way I hear audiences talk about it is exactly what I intended. That’s very satisfying.

What's next for you?

I'm going to Africa after this. And then I'm coming back to a very empty studio, which is always nice because everything is possible. I think my framework is in place and there's so much that I can still explore within that. Working on the female body and technology feels incredibly relevant, and I’m always aiming to speak about the body and the human experience within the environment we're in right now.

Santana’s exhibition is on display at Saatchi Yates until February 22, 2025.