Ángela de la Cruz · Stuck

For its innovative, experimental, and precise character, the formal and conceptual investigations of Angela de la Cruz (A Coruña, 1965), winner of the National Visual Arts Award (2017) and finalist for the prestigious Turner Prize (2010), have led to a whole genealogy of artists who continue to follow some of the paths she premonitory opened. Her work, however, has not only left an evident mark that can be traced in many of today’s creators, but also holds a significant presence in the best collections worldwide. A selection of pieces from Spanish public and private collections is precisely the starting point for this exhibition project.

Stuck is not only the title chosen by the artist for the proposal, but also serves as a true statement of principles for what we are about to encounter once we step into the peculiar spaces of Casal Solleric: Angela de la Cruz’s works push the definition of painting to its limits, a painting that transcends the conventional to become object, sculpture, installation, but also friction, blockage, and confrontation. The painting itself, its materiality, appears forced, tense, and deconstructed in her pieces, sometimes battered or crushed—an expanded painting of deformed and overwhelmed supports, of devastated stretchers and folded canvases that lose their usual and mundane flatness. An uncompromising art, as exhausting, disturbing, visceral, overwhelming, and threatening as it is beautiful and thrilling.

Angela de la Cruz makes the impossible possible through works that maintain a precarious balance, pieces that first interact with their creator and then with the viewers, ultimately achieving complete autonomy within an extraordinary, personal, recognizable, and unique language. An artist who frustrates the expectations of the conventional through a direct, sometimes raw, and always intelligent vocabulary, reflecting her ironic vision of the pictorial. A critical gaze, a way of making, that nearly contradicts itself in sarcasm when it embraces the destruction of painting to ultimately result in paintings with a violent language and strange beauty.

This process of destruction and transformation is not merely a formal issue; it is also conceptual. The artist pushes the very notion of painting to its limit, forcing the materiality of the supports until they seem collapsed. Wear and tear with a clear intention: not only to question traditional modes of painting but also to challenge the hierarchies of art. What at first glance may seem like destruction is, in reality, a profound reflection, an absolute redefinition, a way of confronting the unspeakable in an unstable balance between demolition and creation, fragility and strength, beauty and the unsettling.

Ángela de Cruz · Stuck
Planta Noble / Casal Solleric
January 31 - April 22, 2024
Curators: Iñaki Martínez Antelo and Fernando Gómez de la Cuesta

ACTIVITIES:

Combined visit to the exhibition Stuck by Angela de la Cruz and Resonance by Kyungwoo Chun

Led by Noelia Gómez, cultural mediator

February 1st at 11:00 a.m.
February 20th at 6:00 p.m.

Registration at solleric@palma.es

Breaking the Limits of Painting

A Visit to the Exhibitions by Angela de la Cruz and Ela Fidalgo

Angela de la Cruz's works push the definition of painting to the limits; a painting that transcends convention to become an object, a sculpture, an installation. These works are complemented by Ela Fidalgo's sculptural proposal, which involves the participation of the public to create several pieces from an amalgamation of fabrics and emotions. Led by Noelia Gómez, cultural mediator.

Saturday, March 15 at 11 a.m.

Thursday, March 20 at 6 p.m.

Registration at solleric@palma.es