Ody Saban

Born in 1953 in Istanbul, Ody Saban is the perfect embodiment of cultural interbreeding: a Sephardic Jew who had followed Catholic teaching, she was introduced to art by her Muslim father-in-law, a restorer.

At the age of sixteen, she leaves to study in Israel where she will live in kibbutz for eight years. Arriving in Paris in 1977, she took part in the creation of artists’ squats and gradually imposed her style. Her work has been welcomed in the most prestigious public collections of art brut or outsider art as well as by the National Fund of Contemporary Art. Commenting on the drawings in this exhibition - among the most emblematic of his work - Roger Cardinal writes: “The infinite embraces are the image of an ecstasy that goes beyond the simple carnal haunting. There is here an opening towards something else, an almost mystical impulse, the beginning of an unthinkable harmony”.