Provenance: Private Collection, Singapore

Exhibited: One Raffles Quay, The Connective Thread by Marina Cruz, Organized by the Ernst & Young ASEAN Outreach, Singapore, April 14, 2011 Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts, Tide Table, Taipei, July 16 - October 17, 2021

Literature: Harper's Bazaar Magazine Art Edition, November 2021

ABOUT THE WORK

Agraduate of BFA in Painting from the University of the Philippines, Marina Cruz has exhibited both local and internationally, namely Arndt Art Agency in Berlin, Galerie Ernst Hilger, Vienna and Mind Set Art Center, Taiwan for international and 1335MABINI, Ateneo Art Gallery and Artinformal Makati for the local ones. She received several awards as well, including the grand prize of the Philippine Art Awards in 2008. In 2021, the Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts in Taipei, Taiwan, mounted her first major museum solo show. Cruz discovered her prime subject, the dress, in 2002. Then a student at the University of the Philippines, she had been looking for a piece of fabric for printmaking plates when she found her mother's old baptismal dress. Struck by the old clothing, she began to paint the dresses that her grandmother had made for her children. In the hands of Cruz, they undergo a process of sublime composition to produce an effect similar to minimalist abstraction. The patterns found in each textile, recall the works of abstractions who focused on the interaction between colors and shapes. The folds and creases create a particular kind of texture, similar to the mannered stoked and painterly surfaces perpetuated by formalists. Cruz’s photorealistic paintings of vintage dresses such as the featured piece When Eliza Was Seven are emotionally saturated meditations on the afterlives of one’s personal effects. Each work doubles as a portrait, representing the essence of its wearer through traces of use. It is accompanied by notes that their once-wearers contributed, explaining when and where they would wear a particular item of clothing. The unexpected details such as threadbare hems or blotchy stains adds further vitality to the overall composition, while buttons, holes, tears, and armies of seams also completes the story. Overall, the clever presentational tactics; the devices of display and the source of her imagery; the recollection of events in her family history and the history of her depicted objects, pile the many layers in Marina Cruz that are waiting to be surfaced and understood. Her creations served as a family archive - her grandmother’s hand-sewn dresses represent a record of time, while her painting as “our portraits altogether,” as the artist told Arndt Berlin in 2016. Embedded are the legacies of three generations of women: her grandmother, who made the clothes; her mother and aunt, who once wore them; and herself who, after decades, attempts to revisit the past through them. For this reason, notwithstanding her intentionally nostalgic use of old things and old lives, we suitably recognize Cruz’s practice as a meticulously contemporary one, primarily concerned with the conflicting nature of the painted object and the actual event behind it: the visibility and invisibility of its subject; the simultaneously physical and yet ethereal nature of the painted image.