Editions TRAVIOLES / HALLE SAINT-PIERRE MUSEUM

                                 2001 Paris

        Catalogue “ Black on white, interior worlds “

           Biography ODY SABAN

Martine LUSARDY                  

.                        Ody SABAN was born in 1953 in Istanbul, into a Sephardic         Jewish             family. Her father was a weaver and her mother a dressmaker and collector of antique embroidery from Anatolia. Her parents divorced when she was five. Two years later, her mother married a Moslem artist, a well- known restorer of china and miniatures, as well as a musician and a poet. She attended a Catholic school, and was educated by Italian and French nuns

An introspective dreamy girl, she started to write at twelve, writing long love poems addressed to an unknown person. At fifteen her adolescent equilibrium was shattered when her natural father, with whom she had been living for the last two years, died. The following year, she left for Israel with her boyfriend and worked for three years in a kibbutz. In Israel she learned painting and sculpture, alongside other skills to pay for her stay and her studies at Haifa University. She received a degree in Plastic Arts in 1976. In 1977, aged 24,  the Israelis  minister of education send her too Paris for teaching art. She lived in a tiny room in Belleville and lead workshops for children at the Musée National d’Art Moderne Georges Pompidou. She studied at the Beaux-Arts from 1977 to 1980, which provided her with some sort of security in her precarious situation. From this point on she was involved in a wide variety of artistic endeavour; dance, painting, poetry and performance. She created groups of self taught women artists such as “Singulières Plurielles” , “Art et Regard des femmes” and “Art Cloche” in 1983, the latter in an former armaments factory, which had become a centre  for artists and tramps. In 1980 she went for a long stay in New-York . She returned to France and she married with a french photographer  by whom she had a daughter, Eden in 1982. Today, Ody Saban lives in her flat in Paris and continues to branch out in an extraordinary creative world. Drawings in Indian ink, water-colours, paintings in warm colours depict a fantastic universe of personal beliefs, a mixture of ancient mythologies from her own Middle East, the passions she has adopted and the insights of her own ardour.

With her fried, the poet Thomas Mordant, using the name MordySabbath, she is the author of a series of works for four hands.