Dramatically opening Upright is Still Life with Table (2000): a large oily black canvas that has come off the wall to squat in the gallery space. Its stretcher gapes like a giant devouring mouth that almost completely consumes a table in its capacious fabric folds. At the same time it is impossible, for me at least, not to read the work as an audacious act of exposure\u2014a giant flash\u2014with a canvas skirt hoisted up to reveal the table\u2019s underside and jutting legs. Throughout the show, other quasi-human characteristics are in evidence, whether in Limp (2000), where one unpleasant fecal brown painting is crudely inserted into the ripped surface of another, propping it up, or the uncanny fleshiness of Bloated 111 (Blue) (2012) a bulbous, dimpled wall-mounted rectangular cushion of hammered aluminium painted in rich layers of dark blue oil paint.<\/p>\n
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Installation view of Angela de la Cruz’s Upright Photo: Tom Bird<\/p>\n
An irreverent hustler<\/p>\n
\u201cI use the language of Minimalism but I am not a strict Minimalist, since my work is very anthropomorphic and emotional at times,\u201d de la Cruz has said. The artist, who was born in Spain but has been based in the UK since the late 1980s, credits \u201ca compendium of different influences\u201d in shaping her work. These range across art history, world events, literature and the personal and bodily. For example, as with much of her work, the dimensions of Bloated echo her own; while she points out that the perky pathos of Limp channels the Spanish literary tradition of the picaro, a cunningly charismatic hustler operating at society\u2019s margins, using wit and deception to survive in a corrupt world.<\/p>\n
Domestic furniture also features in her work, standing in for human forms and relationships. In Transfer (2011), a white painted aluminium box\u2014again based on the artist\u2019s dimensions\u2014is suspended between the opposing poles of two white chairs, one a plushy white leather Modernist Knoll, the other a basic utilitarian plastic. In Upright 111, meanwhile, one of the works that gives the show its title, a three-legged chair is both raised and supported by a scruffy paint-marked stool, which in turn is heighted by blocks of wood. Titles are similarly crucial, with de la Cruz considering them part of the works themselves and a key to understanding their figurative aspect. For her, a piece is incomplete until it is given a name.<\/p>\n
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Installation view of Angela de la Cruz’s Upright Photo: Tom Bird<\/p>\n
Although her language has evolved, de la Cruz\u2019s desire to mess with Minimalism with an irreverent and often disquieting humour continues to infuse everything she produces. Since suffering a paralysing cerebral stroke in 2005 she has not been able to physically produce her work and observed in a 2018 interview that it has become \u201cmore general, more universal\u2026 more knowledgeable in a sense\u201d. However, she is also quick to point out that she has always used assistants and collaborators as part of her process, declaring: \u201cI have always organised my work as if I were a cinema director.\u201d She mischievously observes that her output is now \u201cmore violent than before, but in a quiet way\u201d.<\/p>\n
This is certainly borne out by a new commission developed for Ikon in collaboration with the Birmingham Royal Ballet (BRB), on view in the show. Having watched BRB\u2019s The Nutcracker, she became interested in the idea of the Nutcracker figure being repeatedly broken and fixed, seeing it as analogous with ballerinas breaking in their pointe shoes to mould with their feet. The resulting piece is Blister (2026) a visceral blood-red square of beaten aluminium that bulges from the wall, with slivers of fabric in traditional ballet-shoe pink seeping out from its sides. The work, which plays with ideas of rigidity, elasticity and resilience, is an excruciating reminder that behind the precision of every performance lies a throbbing foot. Like all of de la Cruz\u2019s work it is both funny and deadly serious\u2014and takes no prisoners.<\/p>\n