Angela de la Cruz’s paintings are the victims of everyday life, conveying human experiences with tongue in cheek, black humour. Most are psychologically and physically damaged. They have accidents, bully each other, fall on their butts, wear the wrong size canvas, get stuck in doorways, vomit in public, expose their wounds and have parasites and limps. Referencing ‘la picaresca’ from Spanish literature, Angela’s paintings likewise depict desperate lives of mishaps and misadventure.

In this exhibition an oversize painting, titled Stuck, struggles to free itself from a stairway and in Crash two paintings have collided and their conjunction is smeared with dark paint as though bleeding. A broken painting sits in a chair, despondently facing a pristine copy of itself on the wall in Self, and a small Nothing cowers nearby beneath a chair. All are emotionally charged and ill at ease with their surroundings and each other.

Angela explains that
“pleasure, the visceral, the body, eroticism, these are important ideas in my work. Things sagging, dripping. They are all about pushing, pulling, putting in and out, opening the body…”

These paintings are “figurative objects, but not paintings of a figure,” and they summon a gamut of human emotions.

Angela draws upon her background in philosophy and a tradition of violence in painting, both in imagery and technique, to inform much of her work.
In this way her paintings and her systematic conceptual approach continue a conventional journey through art history. Yet her explorations have taken her beyond the normal parameters of painting into an arena in which the artwork personifies the emotion. The viewer is a voyeur stumbling across a violent crime scene, yet there is no associated guilt, as these are merely paintings after all…

This exhibition features new artworks made in Perth during Angela’s residency at The Church Gallery, along with work created over the past five years. The highlight of the exhibition will be a new version of Stuck.

Angela de la Cruz was born in 1965 in Spain, where she studied a BA in Philosophy at the Santiago de Compostela. She moved to London in 1989 and studied at the Chelsea College of Art and followed this with a BA Honours in Fine Art at Goldsmiths’ College and a Master of Arts in Sculpture and Critical Theory from the Slade School of Art. Angela currently lives and works in London where she is represented by Anthony Wilkinson Gallery. She has exhibited extensively in London, and has had solo exhibitions in New York, Vienna, and Brussels.

Proudlysupported by

The Church Gallery Art Angels Inc.

&

The Perth International Arts Festival

*prices valid 2002