Maria Cruz
Elizabeth Newman
Gerardo Tan
July 2 - 30, 2011
Galleria Duemila
This exhibition presents the work of three conceptual painters: Maria Cruz (Berlin), Elizabeth Newman (Melbourne) and Gerardo Tan (Manila), whose practices resonates the underground aesthetic currents of the cities they represent and challenges the fundamental discourses on painting today.
The artists’ individual strategies in the realm of conceptual art and institutional critique, dismantles modernity, structuralist philosophy and contemporary criticism. Each work is an emphasis of the inter-determination and contingency of social and historical phenomena with the cultural values and biases of perspective.
rays on the shutter is an exhibition which provides a glimpse to their individual empowered practice, the materiality of painting, its relevance and existential possibilities.
Maria Cruz’s dialectic approach to her intuitive process in painting includes deduction, excess, erasure or a generative system of flagrant simplicity in her painting process. Her past works include the obliteration of the face value of currency and its levitating social implications. Her current body of work “The Letter X in Color Wheels” is an embodiment of the same gestural process and layering with reference to the letter “X” as an idea of mystique or an unknown factor in the everyday.
Elizabeth Newman’s work has been known in Melbourne for pushing the boundaries of the materiality and space involved in her painting process. Newman uses domestic objects as iconic representations in her work; an act which is both idiosyncratic and monumental in representing an empowered subjective condition.
Gerardo Tan conducts a simulacrum of collage-based paintings, and deconstructs images taken from idealized representations in western art news taken from textbooks, old paintings or magazine clippings. Tan uses photography, painting, digital print, collage and silkscreen to re-frame images from his immediate memory in creating layer upon layer of information and associations. Albeit abstract, the fragments are not completely independent of each other and upon further investigation you’ll notice developed procedures in each painting process thereby creating inner dynamism, entirely different from that of its supposed model, presenting itself as the final cause.
Maria Cruz (b.1957) lives and work in Berlin. She has been exhibiting internationally since 1986 and has worked in Sydney, Australia as a Lecturer in Fine Arts from 1990 until 2008. A recipient of numerous arts prizes and artists grants, her works are in public and private collections here and abroad. This will be her 4th exhibition at the Galleria Duemila.
Elizabeth Newman (b.1962) is from Melbourne who has been making work since the 1980s. Newman studied Painting at the Victorian College of the Arts in the early 1980s. Her most recent exhibitions were a solo show ‘Lights On’ at Neon Parc in December 2010, and an exhibition with German artist Esther Klaes, at Spazio A in Pistoia, Italy, in February 2011. Elizabeth Newman’s work is represented by Neon Parc gallery in Melbourne, Australia.
Gerardo Tan (b. 1960) lives and works in Manila. He took his MFA at the State University of New York at Buffalo, USA and his BFA at the University of the Philippines in Quezon City, Manila. He works across media from painting, collage, photography and artist books to video and found objects in room-sized installations. He has been included in several international exhibitions in Asia, USA and Europe. He is currently working on three solo shows in Manila, Kuala Lumpur and Graz for the year 2011.
www.galleriaduemila.com
