Angela de la Cruz has spent decades breaking boundaries between painting and sculpture by combining the languages and histories of both mediums. Her works behave like figurative objects, driven by human experience and marked by performative physicality. In Upright is Still Life with Table (2000), a large oily black canvas detaches from the wall and occupies the gallery space, with stretcher folds resembling a devouring mouth and a table nearly consumed within the fabric. Other works add quasi-human traits, including a fecal-brown painting inserted into a ripped surface to prop another painting, and a hammered-aluminium cushion rendered with layered dark blue oil paint to create uncanny fleshiness. Minimalist language is used without strict adherence, emphasizing emotion and anthropomorphism.
"“All my work is activated by human experience,” she told me when I interviewed her back in the 1990s. “My paintings are figurative objects.”"
"Dramatically opening Upright is Still Life with Table (2000): a large oily black canvas that has come off the wall to squat in the gallery space. Its stretcher gapes like a giant devouring mouth that almost completely consumes a table in its capacious fabric folds. At the same time it is impossible, for me at least, not to read the work as an audacious act of exposure-a giant flash-with a canvas skirt hoisted up to reveal the table's underside and jutting legs."
"Throughout the show, other quasi-human characteristics are in evidence, whether in Limp (2000), where one unpleasant fecal brown painting is crudely inserted into the ripped surface of another, propping it up, or the uncanny fleshiness of Bloated 111 (Blue) (2012) a bulbous, dimpled wall-mounted rectangular cushion of hammered aluminium painted in rich layers of dark blue oil paint."
"“I use the language of Minimalism but I am not a strict Minimalist, since my work is very anthropomorphic and emotional at times,” de la Cruz has said."
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