Angela de la Cruz
Minimum (Green / Yellow), 2004
Oil and acrylic on canvas and metal
32,5 x 18,5 x 8 cm
Angela de la Cruz

Angela de la Cruz is the Galician artist with the greatest international acclaim of her generation. A graduate in Philosophy & Arts from Santiago de Compostela University, Angela de la Cruz (A Coruña, 1965) moved to London in the mid-1980s, where she studied art at Chelsea College of Art, Goldsmiths College and Slade School of Art, and where she has since lived and carried out her work. Angela de la Cruz’s work is characterised by the dialogue she manages to establish between painting and sculpture via her treatment of the canvas and stretcher. She creates chiefly monochromatic paintings, which fracture, distort and turn on themselves, and gives them a 3D feeling they lacked before. The painting is thus striped of its ‘aura’ of grandeur. The end of the 1990s saw an inflection point in her career thanks to the project ‘Larger than Life’ (1998), an enormous twisted canvas within an enormous stretcher which completely takes over the space it is contained in, even going beyond. Conceived for exhibition in the midst of the Royal Festival Hall dance floor, it fascinated both critics and public, and meant the recognition of who she is today, the most important Spanish artist worldwide. This acknowledgement confirmed her as a Turner Prize finalist in 2010. She subsequently began incorporating in her work recycled elements, furniture chiefly pulled from the street, elements inserted in the space like distorted broken sculptural pieces, seemingly holding themselves up in a precarious balance. Angela de la Cruz’s work feeds on both cultural and artistic references like Goya, Arte Povera, the writings of Jacques Derrida, as well as biographical elements and reflections on the pictoric event and space. Since the end of 1990s she has taken part in numerous individual and collective exhibitions, and her work is represented in collections such as Fundació La Caixa in Barcelona, Moderna Musset in Stockholm, National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, Tate Collection and Fundación Barrié in Galicia.

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