Provenance: with Silverlens

ABOUT THE WORK

Taniguchi’s works depend for their impact on direct visual experience. Its meaning is released by the face to face encounter with actual surface, actual size, actual color, and actual texture. They explore permutations of radically simplified formats in order to concentrate on issues of scale, interval, edge and the like. Maria Taniguchi is best known for her ongoing series of large 'brick' paintings in which she arranges a consistent grid pattern into different surface configurations. Taniguchi emphasizes the performative nature of these paintings — the way in which she first draws out a grid on the canvas and then paints in one brick at a time. Despite their predetermined composition, the surfaces of these paintings are not uniform or static. Gradations of shade are achieved by varying the amount of water and acrylic and become discernible as the viewer moves in front of the painting. The repetitive process of Taniguchi's paintings can be viewed as a form of organizing structure in the context of the densely populated urban environment of Manila. The paintings are exhibited leaning on the ground, affording them a sculptural quality and reinforcing their relationship to minimal art. After a BFA in Sculpture at the University of the Philippines, Maria Taniguchi completed an MFA in Art Practice at Goldsmiths in London in 2009. In the same year she joined the LUX Associates Artists Program, a post-academic program based in London for artists working with the moving image.