Maria Cruz and Elizabeth Newman come together after 20 years since their first tandem exhibition, which explored the parameters of genre in painting. For their current showing at MO_Space, they offer alternative subjectivities parallel to more mainstream concerns in contemporary painting.

Maria Cruz approaches her studio as a performance space, and each work she creates out of this arena is the resultant object of a gesture that she dutifully enacts—whether it is painting all the titles of Yoko Ono’s songs or one million dots. Her seemingly effortless works belie a much grander scheme to underscore nature, and the nature of art. Following the tradition of German Romantic Painting and Russian Constructivism, Maria extends both the formal qualities of painting, and its more emotive aspirations in her new works that combine the raw energy of painting with the fastidiousness of stitching.

The implied domesticity in the critique of Abstract Expressionism and Minimalist Painting is also evident in Elizabeth Newman’s works. Her works—made out of various pieces of fabric, whether bought, found, or inherited, and sewn together like a quilt—are soft versions of their hard-edge counterparts. All untitled and unnamed, except for the initials of the persons the works pay homage or refer to, Elizabeth’s works consciously negate representation and familiar imagery, preferring instead to draw the viewer’s attention to the work’s materiality—its color, shape, and texture—its actual and not imagined states of being.

Gender, or its slightly tamer term, femininity, cannot be sidestepped in this exhibition. The fact that both artists are women who continue to work with a tradition long dominated by masculine expressions point out that there are still some unresolved and less-articulated issues within the history of painting that were perhaps lost amidst the propaganda of many feminist writings on art.

Most discourses on this topic have led to further dichotomies, reinforcing stereotypes of ‘male masterpiece’ vs. ‘female craft.’ Typical binary systems have proved to be insufficient in reading the works of many artists, male and female, after Modernism. Fifty years after the feminist liberation in the 1960s, it is time to find a new language that is more engaged with the works themselves, rather than the imploding net of other agendas that casts itself upon the artists’ own intent and personal subjectivities.

Maria Cruz and Elizabeth Newman, in their insistence to work within a field of painting that privileges instinct over prescribed, hierarchical views, dare to escape the common and burdened representation of most women’s work. Beyond the politics of gender, their works touch on more encompassing and less divisive precepts that are integral to all art. Rather than engaging in empty conversations and small talks on the external, and perhaps the irrelevant, that pervades over most recent art-making, their works are a silent call for a return to what is intrinsic in art, and a mute refusal to give in to surface definitions.

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