Lizza May David. Mangrove

About

In her previous works she has considered the reappropriation of Philippine modern painting (particularly those found in institutional collections in the Philippines). She confronts questions of abstraction and historiography relating to simultaneities and transnational aesthetic interactions. She is interested in how social and cultural capital is represented and how to highlight its marginal aspects. Within an architectural framework she works with dichotomies of display and issues of visibility/invisibilities. Much of her previous work is autobiographical and investigates issues of identity, labor/migration and memory.

Exploratory in nature, the paintings today reflect her contextual artistic disposition, confronting formalism and abstraction. She understands the canvas as sensorium for social change within specific localities, looking at the paintings’ materiality, sensualism, proximity and questions of non-/representation through processual painting practice. Seeing the canvas as a subject, like in her documentary films, she follows the image wherever it takes her. The artist anchors her approach in the proximity of artistic resource, as well as her responses to the physicality of painting. According to art historian Oona Lochner „she circles the missing, the absent, the unknown, and reproduces margins until a center emerges. Her painting becomes evidence of ‚localized, embodied thought’1).

1)  Avigail Moss/Kerstin Stakemeier, Implicit Horizon, in: id. (eds.), Painting. The Implicit Horizon, The Jan van Eyck Academie, 2012, pp. 9-21, here: p. 18.