For a viewer faced with a painted wall, the outermost surface of Maria Taniguchi’s untitled paintings appears almost depthless: thousands of assiduously painted bricks are sealed flat by its medium, combined to form an immense presence whose weight is merely canvas. To be confronted by a painting mimicking a wall—or a wall mimicking a painting—might seem facetious, if not for the work’s clear invitation to look over the immediate and into Taniguchi’s practice as it stands in its entirety. Concerned with the agency of painting as a conceptual apparatus in a constellation of work that includes video installation and sculpture, for the artist, the brick paintings might be seen as a device encapsulating, in code, a synopsis of thinking, a nervous system of sorts.
Silverlens is proud to present a new piece from this body of work. With the painting, or perhaps more in relation to it, a video will be shown based on a fictional recollection of a group show set in Manila, where, guided by a disembodied voiceover the camera takes the viewer for a moon walk across the museum space.
About the Artist
Maria Taniguchi (b.1981) was born and raised in Dumaguete City. After a BFA in Sculpture at the University of the Philippines, she 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. She currently lives and works in Manila, where she received the Ateneo Art Award for her solo exhibition Echo Studies (2011) at the Jorge Vargas Museum, where she showed the first of several large-scale ‘brick’ paintings, a video installation, drawings, and photographic work. The following year, she again received the Ateneo Art Award for the video Untitled (Celestial Motors) (2012) shown at Silverlens Manila. Taniguchi was recently selected for Art Statements (2013), a section of solo presentations by emerging artists at Art Basel 44. Selected recent projects include HIWAR: Conversations in Amman, Amman, Jordan (2013); Without a Murmur, Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, Manila (2012); The Philippine Contemporary: To Scale the Past and the Possible, Metropolitan Museum of Manila; and, Don’t You Know Who I Am? Art After Identity Politics, Museum of Contemporary Art (MHKA), Antwerp. She will also be in residency at the Singapore Tyler Print Institute in 2016.
