MO_Space is pleased to present Unconscious, a solo exhibition by Maria Cruz with a meditation on the nature of painting as a visual measure on the infinite flow of currency: as signs multiplied and exchanged multitudinously, similarly as capital is amounted and transformed into stockpiled desires, the countless change collect and distribute across its immense field, equating gestural labor with an abstraction of digits, intensely palpable yet inconceivably immaterial in sum—turning painting into a conceptual bank, a deep pool of cultural resource.
Picturing the unseen power of an economic libido surging from the concatenation of suggestive rises and shares excite the unconscious eye with rhythms and tempo that produce the painting’s aura. In this suite of large scale paintings, Cruz ostensibly finds credit from the wealth of painting’s vast history, initially touching upon the ocular ecstasy presented in Impressionism, with its experiments on brushwork and pigment in order to disintegrate the image in pure light while simultaneously pushing the nature of simulacra. Cruz similarly overwhelms the picture field with various currencies of circular strokes each with their own values, transparencies, and saturations, which successively accrues into larger bodies of vibrant denomination.
The paintings evoke furthermore the experiments of early modernist abstraction to deconstruct the image into theoretical formulas of color, shape, and surface, reducing it virtually to its essence, and pressed further down as concept. Thus, the pictorial sublime in Cruz’s paintings not only are reified in the symbol of the circulating discs, but they are patterned after the conceptual production of artists such as Bochner, Baldessari, or LeWitt, in reducing an image to a text or a set of instructions, with measurements and pure information. Maria Cruz’s paintings accordingly are reimagined as dynamic colorful veils of transformation, highlighted by ecstatic points of discourse, mixing diverse notions of abstraction—from representation to critique, which provide a powerful statement for painting’s currency in today’s expansive artistic and intellectual plateaus.
About the Artist
About the Artists
Maria Cruz (b. 1957, Manila) was recipient of the Portia Geach Portrait Prize (1997), the Ps1 International Studio Program, New York (2000–2001), the Australia Council Artist Development and Project Grant (1999, 2000–2001), the City of Hobart Contemporary Art Prize (2004), and the Karl Hofer Gesselschaft Residency, Berlin, Germany (2005), as well as residencies at the University of Woolongong (2008), and the Canberra Institute of the Arts (1989). She has lectured in different universities in Australia, including the Canberra School of Art, Australian National University, the Sydney School of Arts, University of Sydney, and the School of Contemporary Arts, University of Western Sydney.
Cruz has participated in solo and group exhibitions internationally, in galleries and institutions such as Galeria Duemila, Artinformal, MO_Space, Ateneo Art Gallery, the Metropolitan Museum of Manila, Cultural Center of the Philippines, the UTS Gallery University of Technology (Australia), the Kaliman Gallery (Australia) Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces (Australia), Galerie Droescher-Meyer (Germany), the Freies Museum (Germany), and the Mori Gallery in Sydney, among others.
Related Exhibitions
About the Artists
About the Artist
Maria Cruz (b. 1957, Manila) was recipient of the Portia Geach Portrait Prize (1997), the Ps1 International Studio Program, New York (2000–2001), the Australia Council Artist Development and Project Grant (1999, 2000–2001), the City of Hobart Contemporary Art Prize (2004), and the Karl Hofer Gesselschaft Residency, Berlin, Germany (2005), as well as residencies at the University of Woolongong (2008), and the Canberra Institute of the Arts (1989). She has lectured in different universities in Australia, including the Canberra School of Art, Australian National University, the Sydney School of Arts, University of Sydney, and the School of Contemporary Arts, University of Western Sydney.
Cruz has participated in solo and group exhibitions internationally, in galleries and institutions such as Galeria Duemila, Artinformal, MO_Space, Ateneo Art Gallery, the Metropolitan Museum of Manila, Cultural Center of the Philippines, the UTS Gallery University of Technology (Australia), the Kaliman Gallery (Australia) Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces (Australia), Galerie Droescher-Meyer (Germany), the Freies Museum (Germany), and the Mori Gallery in Sydney, among others.
Related Exhibitions
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