Nothing Under a Chair

When Ángela de la Cruz moved to London in the late 1980s and early 1990s, a new generation of British artists known as the Young British Artists (YBA) was emerging, notable for their groundbreaking approach to materials and artistic techniques. At that time, De la Cruz — who was a Turner Pri ze finalist in 2010 — was exploring the limits of painting with an unmistakable syntax, assimilating minimalism, process art and Supports/Surfaces painting.
Her series Nothing (1998–2001) deals with the impossibility of painting and artistic work, using crumpled and discarded monochrome canvases. In Nothing Under a Chair, a large crumpled canvas has been tossed under a chair, representing, in the artist’s words, ‘paintings waiting.   [...] Unable for the moment to be anything else, they wait’. This is one of her first decidedly sculptural pieces, referring to the studio where painting is manifested as a becoming.

Carmen Fernández Aparicio