Bulto

What happens beneath the surface

“I like the title ‘Bulto’. It’s intentionally ambiguous. It can be sexual, dangerous, or innocent. The word suggests something is happening beneath the surface, something hidden. This idea is present throughout the series.”

— Ángela de la Cruz

With these words, Ángela de la Cruz introduces Bulto, her first exhibition in Mexico at the Travesía Cuatro gallery. A title that, as the artist suggests, hides more than it reveals at first glance, inviting a deep reflection on painting and its dialogue with space. Each ‘bulto’ evokes a latent presence, a truth that is hinted at from the surface of the canvas, laden with echoes ranging from the anthropomorphic to the mysterious. 

Ángela de la Cruz (La Coruña, 1965) is one of the most prominent figures in contemporary art. Her move to London in her youth, inspired by the vibrant post-punk music scene, marked the beginning of a career that would challenge the boundary between painting and sculpture. A decisive moment in her career occurred in her London studio when, in a fit of frustration, she hit a canvas, deforming it. Far from being a destructive act, this gesture revealed a new dimension: the canvas acquired body, opening a three-dimensional path for painting. Her innovative vision earned her a nomination for the prestigious Turner Prize in 2010, consolidating her as an internationally renowned artist. 

De la Cruz’s artistic exploration has focused on dismantling traditional painting to give it a physical presence and vulnerability. Her art is an intimate journey through matter: from the iconic gesture of hitting and breaking canvases, transforming the accident into a “body” with history and an echo of trauma, to freeing the fabric from its stretcher in works like Deflated (2009-ongoing), where the canvas collapses, a flaccid skin that breathes. 

This investigation into fragility extends to her Homeless (1996) series, where canvases surrender, bodies devoid of skeleton, and Clutter (2002-2005), where she compresses canvases and objects into sculptural masses that whisper stories of memory and excess. This evolution culminates in the Bulto (2025) series, her most recent work, where the artist traces a different path: she abandons accident to embrace deliberate construction. The tension, far from being fortuitous, is presented to the viewer with a material honesty that is almost questioning. Formally, De la Cruz dialogues with the minimalist heritage, using the form of the painting and the power of monochrome as foundations. But here, deconstruction transforms into an act of assemblage. The pieces are composed of visible layers of canvas, meticulously painted in acrylic. The tension, a constant echo in her work, no longer arises from a hidden interior. It is, on the contrary, the result of subtle engineering: a metal bolt, alien to pictorial tradition, pierces and compresses the superimposed layers. This gesture of constriction concentrates force, sculpting a topography of folds and wrinkles. The work does not hide its essence; it reveals it. 

De la Cruz, with Bulto, transcends the metaphor of the wounded body to investigate the logic of the assembled body. Not only does she blur the boundaries between painting and sculpture, but she also delves into a territory where the work itself reflects on its own existence. This exhibition is the affirmation of an artist at the height of her language, capable of finding renewed and powerful eloquence, not in breakage, but in the subtle and deliberate tension of assemblage. 

– Luz Massot

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After graduating in Philosophy at the University of Santiago de Compostela, in the late eighties Ángela de la Cruz left her native A Coruña and moved to London, where she enrolled at the Chelsea College of Art and then furthered her artistic training at Goldsmiths College and the Slade School of Art. Since then her career has burgeoned, as reflected in the show entitled After, staged at the Camden Arts Center in 2010 and for which she was nominated for the Turner Prize. In 2017 was awarded with the Premio Nacional de Artes Plásticas of Spain.

At first sight Ángela de la Cruz’s paintings appear to have been destroyed or attacked. The deformed or broken stretchers and the crooked canvases are then hung on walls or laid to rest on floors as trophies. Despite the fact that this alteration of forms is deliberate and systematic, it is the process itself that reveals the final result. Emotionally raw, cunning and quite ironic, De la Cruz reflects on the language of painting by introducing painting’s self-destruction in her work: “The moment I cut the canvas I dissolve the grandeur of history of painting.”

Violent, with no apologetic intention and often showing dark humour, her work calmly reveals visceral emotion, breaking the barriers of established pictorial rules. The implicit feeling aroused by her scenes is that of recent frantic violence, violence that leaves in its wake the paradoxical impression of a dying energy and a sense of peace and quiet that is at once threatening and inescapable. 

Exhi-bi-tions include: Stuck, Casal Solleric Art Centre, Palma de Mallorca, Spain (2024); Larger than Life, Museo Cabañas, Guadalajara, Mexico (2021); Homeless, CGAC, Santiago de Compostela (2019); Homeless, Mid career retrospective curated by Carolina Grau, Azkuna Zentroa, Bilbao, Spain (2018); Shut up and Paint, Nation-al Gallery of Vic-to-ria, Mel-bourne (2016); Escombros / Debris, Curated by Carolina Grau. Fundación Luis Seoane, A Coruña, Spain; Centre d’art la Panera, Lleida, Spain (2015);  Traspa-so, Hel-ga de Alvear, Madrid (2014); Colour me in’ Esb-jerg Art Museum, Denmark (2014); Delim-i-ta-tions, Her-zliya Muse-um of Con-tem-po-rary Art, Tel Aviv (2012); After, Cam-den Arts Cen-tre, Lon-don (2010); Soft Sculp-ture, Nation-al Gallery, Can-ber-ra (2009), among many others. 

Pub-lic col-lec-tions include: TATE Col-lec-tion, Lon-don; British Coun-cil Col-lec-tion, Unit-ed King-dom; Contempo-rary Art Soci-ety, Unit-ed King-dom; Fun-da-ción La Caixa Fun-dación, Barcelona; Nation-al Gallery of Vic-to-ria, Mel-bourne; GOMA / Queens-land Art Gallery, Bris-bane; FRAC, Nord Pas de Calais, Dunkerque, France; Uni-ver-si-ty Col-lec-tion, Brux-elles; as well as pri-vate and cor-po-rate col-lec-tions in Aus-tralia, Europe, and the Unit-ed States

The artist lives and works in London, UK