Provenance: Estate of the Family

ABOUT THE WORK

The two pictures are structured to emphasize the delicate red shapes. Each red object is there for a symbolic purpose, interpreted in the mind’s eye. The red ‘entity’ in the first painting suggests a human form, while the red entities in the second suggest curtains. But those are just suggestions. Taniguchi’s cerebral approach acts as a brake on any temptation to indulge in her use of color expressionistically. Taniguchi highlights the red colored elements as much as she subdues the agitated blue strokes at the background. Both are compositions with off kilter order and balance. But it is not all mind. It is not all the intellectual delight experienced when contemplating the work. Taniguchi has subsumed some degree of feeling in the painting, as betrayed by the overall application of blue in the background. When Maria Taniguchi won the Hugo Boss Asia Art 2015 award, Larys Frogier, chair of the Hugo Boss Asia Art jury and director of RAM, said in a statement. “[Taniguchi’s] never ending development of … paintings engages subtle dialogues and blurs the frontiers with sculpture, architecture, installation, offering the spectators a powerful experience of the physical, the geo-political and the mental limitations/extensions of the inside-out space/time representations…”. “Maria Taniguchi solidly positions her work, without any compromise, into the context of Asia and international contemporary art,” Frogier explained.