A Prosaic Uprightness: Review of Angela de la Cruz’s ‘UPRIGHT’ at Ikon

Angela de la Cruz gives pain a body that can no longer hold itself upright – which resonates through the exhibition’s apt title ‘UPRIGHT’, guest curated by Carolina Grau who frames it around the condition of ‘standing.⁰¹ In de la Cruz’s case, this way of working also appears to be a de-monumentalising one: on the one hand, the work keeps sinking inwardly into itself, its centre of gravity slipping, its structure loosening, its surface bulging, buckling, and turning outward, as if bringing its own insufficiency, weakness, and pressure up to the surface. On the other hand, it keeps extending outward, towards walls, floors, furniture, and supporting structures, but also towards another body, towards a relational mode of existence.

The shapes de la Cruz works with are not those of a body – no clear internal framework, no fixed outer contour. Usually, a body is understood as a stable arrangement that unfolds outwardly: there is an interior structure, an exterior form, and a surface that covers the body in its entirety. Weight is absorbed internally, pressure is structurally borne, and the body thus appears as a relatively complete, closed, and recognisable whole. But de la Cruz’s works bring precisely this order to collapse: support and surface permeate one another, weight and contour press against each other, and inner weakness, pressure, and imbalance seep into the external form. As a result, these objects are no longer organisms with clear layers and perceptible depth. They rather resemble a condition of total pressure: internal support continually fails, the outer contour is pushed outward, and the edges sink downward. What appears here is not a complete body, but a body losing the capacity to support itself, a body that reveals its own insufficiency and fragility before its form has fully fallen apart.

At the entrance of the exhibition, Still Life with Table (2000), with its black canvas roughly draped over collapsed domestic objects, already lays this failure bare; Limp (2000) makes the point even more clearly, showing that uprightness in de la Cruz is not naturally achieved, but awkwardly sustained through another canvas stitched into it. By the time we reach Bloated III (2012), the sense of internal pressure becomes a swollen, almost deformed outer contour, form no longer responding to any stable internal order. Instead, it is being forcibly stretched outward from within by some invisible pressure.⁰²

On the other hand, de la Cruz does not allow such a body to remain enclosed within itself. Her works rarely look self-sufficient; they lean against walls, floors, tables, chairs, doors, windows, or even another canvas. Leaning, borrowing force, being held up: this is their mode of existence. In Transfer (White) with armchair (2011), the canvas is bound to an armchair, making support and dependence inseparable, and the need for external assistance impossible to conceal. The new commission produced in collaboration with Birmingham Royal Ballet, placed at the centre of the exhibition, pushes these sets of relations further: de la Cruz is no longer only dealing with the relations between painting and furniture, between structure and point of support, but turns her working method towards the dancer’s body and a bodily logic that contains both fragility and strength. The work itself looks like a form being squeezed from within and without. The deep red surface swells and dents like skin, or like soft tissue repeatedly struck, stretched, and pressed. The pale pink sections spill, slip, and emerge from the edges, like an inner layer being squeezed out, soft, yet carrying an almost unsettling intimacy. The work emerged from de la Cruz;s long observation of Birmingham Royal Ballet’s rehearsals for The Nutcracker: the damaged nutcracker, the dancers’ ability to convey fragility and strength through the body, and her own method of binding materials into elegant yet robust forms are brought together here. Rather than a physical issue within a static structure, it becomes something performative.

Reach (2002) gives this outward extension a more explicitly social dimension. One painting presses on top of another, climbing upwards. In the exhibition text, this upward gesture is read in relation to the Catalan tradition of human towers, consisting in stacking bodies layer by layer and to reach greater height through mutual support. But de la Cruz’s own description –  like someone climbing up to look over to the other side, like gossiping⁰³ – lightens this gesture, bringing it to an ordinary human action. This is where that the ‘pathos and humour’ mentioned in Ikon’s text begins to take concrete form: the pressured body is not pushed towards the tragic, but allowed to retain both pain and wit in the awkward process of staying upright while slightly off balance.

If certain sculptural traditions shape forms that bulge, twist, and rise from abundance – an unceasing surge of force – de la Cruz’s work moves upward and marks an extraordinary moment of fluidity that does not come from plenitude, but from resisting the fall. De la Cruz’s own presence shifts the tone. In interview, she has described her work as not poetic, but ‘very prosaic’ and has said that what she wants is ‘to bring the work down to earth, to be as realistic as possible’.⁰⁴ Those bulging, buckling, outward-turning, reaching surfaces can easily be read as evidence of trauma, vulnerability, injury, or the pressures of survival. But de la Cruz resists such a frontal tragic frame of interpretation. She drags them back down to the more mundane dimensions of life: gossip magazines, women stepping out for a cigarette after cosmetic surgery, labour, money, the market, dependence, and bodily limitation. All those ungenerous yet inescapable surfaces of reality. Pain here is no longer purified into an inner experience, but continues to cling to the surface of life. It has not disappeared, nor been overcome. Humour therefore does not stand opposite pain, nor does it weaken it. On the contrary, it gives pain greater depth and complexity.

I want to end with the work Upright Piano (1999). Looking less like a finished work than a structure still held open: not yet closed, unresolved, still waiting for a pair of hands, a stretch of time,  or a sound to enter it. Here, relation takes another form: the mutual borrowing of sound and shape, the mutual bearing-up of artist and friend, the continuation of the work through time. On the day of the opening, while the host was still speaking, de la Cruz had already turned herself towards the piano, as though a body had begun waiting for a response before explanation, before meaning. The work was played and was listened to. It was no longer simply an object but seemed to divide from within itself another self in sound. A self that could only be brought forth, however briefly, through someone else’s hands. By that point, UPRIGHT no longer felt like a word merely describing form, but one about relation. Artist, curator, and performer sitting tightly together, sharing one microphone, in the open expanse of the gallery.