Saban, Ody

Background: born of fairly wealthy Sephardic Jewish parents.
Education: a convent education until 16.
Profession/occupation:
Art form/medium: drawing, painting.
Start artwork:
Relevant info: her mother remarried to a Moslem who was a well-known miniature and china restorer. He was also a musician and poet and greatly influenced Ody’s artistic development.
(Solo-) exhibitions:
References: Hood, John; Ody Saban, in: Raw Vision #27
Outsider Art Sourcebook, 2009, p. 136.

Ody Saban was a lonely but imaginative child, she created a play world of her own, talking and singing to exotic objects around the house. Ody tells of this experience. ‘To me it seems that in myself, the woken dreams, spontaneous imagination, and semi-controlled hallucinations have developed rather than lessened with age. I continue to practice my childhood games almost constantly, and more intensely, but in a visual and interiorized manner.’

She was brought up beside the sea by her mother and step-father, a Moslem and restorer of glass and painted miniatures, who was also an amateur musician. His artistic influence on the young Ody was profound, as were the old Turkish embroideries her mother collected to make fabric assemblages. Mother has lived in Israel and New York, but for much of her adult life has lived and worked in Paris. This rich varied cultural upbringing and experience engendered simultaneously distaste for religious and cultural dogmatism and a sensibility which embodies East and West.

Ody Saban
1953 Istanbul, Turkey -