At Birmingham's Ikon Gallery, Angela De La Cruz's Audacious, Visceral Art Takes No Prisoners The Art Newspaper International Art News And Events

At Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, Angela de la Cruz is staging a quiet confrontation between painting and sculpture. Her exhibition, Upright, on view until September 6, brings together works that seem less displayed than bodily present: canvases that slump, buckle, protrude, or brace themselves against the wall and floor. It is her first exhibition in a UK institution since her Camden Arts Centre survey in 2010, the show that led to her Turner Prize nomination.

De la Cruz, who was born in Spain and has been based in the UK since the late 1980s, has spent more than three decades pushing painting beyond its expected limits. In Upright, that long inquiry feels sharpened rather than softened. Still Life with Table (2000) opens the exhibition with a large black canvas that has slipped from the wall and settled into the room, its stretcher opening like a mouth around a table caught in the folds of fabric. The work reads at once as collapse and exposure, a painting that behaves like a body.

That anthropomorphic charge runs through the exhibition. In Limp (2000), one brown painting is crudely inserted into the torn surface of another, turning damage into a kind of support. Bloated 111 (Blue) (2012) shifts the mood again: a wall-mounted rectangle of hammered aluminum, painted in dense blue oil, swells with an uncanny fleshiness. De la Cruz has long said that her work is activated by human experience, and here that idea is made literal through form, weight, and vulnerability.

Furniture becomes another proxy for the body. In Transfer (2011), a white painted aluminum box, scaled to the artist's own dimensions, is suspended between two white chairs - one a plush Knoll model, the other a plain plastic seat. Upright 111, one of the works that gives the exhibition its title, raises a three-legged chair on a paint-marked stool and blocks of wood, as if balance itself were under negotiation.

Titles matter as much as materials in de la Cruz's practice. She has said that a work is not complete until it is named, and in Upright the titles help clarify the figurative logic running through the show. The pieces are not illustrations of the body, but analogues for it: strained, propped up, and occasionally on the verge of collapse.

That tension has only deepened since de la Cruz suffered a paralysing cerebral stroke in 2005 and could no longer physically make her work. She has said the practice became“more general, more universal... more knowledgeable in a sense,” while also noting that she has always worked with assistants and collaborators, organizing her studio“as if I were a cinema director.” The exhibition's new commission with the Birmingham Royal Ballet extends that collaborative method. Blister (2026), a blood-red square of beaten aluminum with pink fabric seeping from its sides, suggests a wound, a curtain, and a stage set at once.

What emerges at Ikon is not a retreat from painting's history, but a forceful reanimation of it. De la Cruz keeps Minimalism in view, then unsettles it with humor, abrasion, and a distinctly human sense of fragility.

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