Angela de la Cruz: ​‘Home­less’

From Octo­ber 25, 2018 to Jan­u­ary 20, 2019 Azku­na Zen­troa presents the exhi­bi­tion ​‘Home­less’ by Angela de la Cruz, Nation­al Plas­tic Arts Prizewin­ner 2017, and curat­ed by Car­oli­na Grau, from 25^th Octo­ber 2018 to 20^th Jan­u­ary 2019. This exhi­bi­tion presents a jour­ney through the work done from 1996 to 2018, cre­at­ing dif­fer­ent asso­ci­a­tions with works from diverse peri­ods, the major­i­ty of which have not been exhib­it­ed ret­ro­spec­tive­ly. The exhi­bi­tion takes its title from one of the artist’s first works break­ing the stretch­er. ​‘Home­less’ (1996) was one of her first paint­ings to use the sur­round­ing space, not only to con­tain the work but also to dra­ma­tize its con­di­tion as a paint­ing. This great yel­low­ish paint­ing with its rough­ly bro­ken stretch­er ris­es up from the ground lurk­ing in the cor­ner of the exhi­bi­tion space. Through­out her career over 20 years Angela de la Cruz (Coruña 1965) has exper­i­ment­ed with the lan­guage of paint­ing. Since she began, De la Cruz has tried to rede­fine the terms and bound­aries of the medi­um, focus­ing both on the paint­ing as an object and in terms of what it can rep­re­sent. De la Cruz has devel­oped a spe­cif­ic lan­guage which enables her to endow her paint­ings with sculp­tur­al qual­i­ty, eras­ing the bound­aries between paint­ing and sculp­ture, and using each of them with­out dis­tinc­tion depend­ing on what she wants to express and the need of each work. As the artist has said, ​“It’s a sculp­ture using the lan­guage of paint­ing and vice ver­sa. In oth­er words, it’s a paint­ing and a sculp­ture.” A fre­quent top­ic in her work is her con­cern about what is going on now, social inequal­i­ty, pol­i­tics, effects of cli­mate change, and images of wars or ter­ror­ist attacks. ​‘Home­less’ refers to those with­out a roof over their heads, those who car­ry their belong­ings and mem­o­ries around with them, just like the artist’s works, which are always tied to the his­to­ry of paint­ing. More Infor­ma­tion