Maria Taniguchi
Galerie Perrotin, Hong Kong
November 3 – December 21, 2016
Opening Reception: 6pm-8pm, November 3

Galerie Perrotin, Hong Kong is pleased to present the first solo exhibition dedicated to Maria Taniguchi in Hong Kong, showcasing about 6 brick paintings and 1 installation.
Though the artist refers to them as “brick paintings”, these works are only a suggestion of a solid structure. That each brick is painted individually and the surface is constructed over a duration evince an engagement with labor and time. The paintings appear to be either exterior or interior, or are even possibly not “walls”. That they lean suggests a relation to action, as though it had been extracted from somewhere or about to move out of place. These being the latest of a series of brick paintings, with its varying measurements, hint that they might belong to a much larger complete structure, or that these pieces are parts of an imperceptible whole.
Susan Gibb, in the catalog for Taniguchi’s recent exhibition at the ICA, writes, “While the works take on the scale of history or social realist paintings, they do not follow the traditions of allegory and figurative expression. They also subvert the pictorial strategy of photorealism, using the grid that guides its pictorial illusionism to forefront the labour involved in the image’s production, while refusing as well to be simply abstractions, with the bricks depicting the concrete architectural form of the wall, yet slyly slipping from these very surfaces. Left untitled, Taniguchi’s brick paintings are neither wholly image nor object; instead, at each and every moment, they are both, perfectly balanced in-between.”
In past video work, Taniguchi has imagined a bare fountain in a lunar room where a roving eye floats over 3D objects. Where there is a fountain there is always water, but here we find none, though the care taken into its formation suggests an understanding of its purpose: the machine must work if turned on. Yet, we can assume the flow of the water in our minds, and trace it as it is pushed out of the pump, through the transparent pipes, and back down, alive in an infinite loop that we can picture in the mind quite clearly, over and over.
Maria Taniguchi was born in Dumaguete City, the Philippines, in 1981. She won the HUGO BOSS ASIA ART Award in 2015 and was a LUX Associate Artist in 2009. Recent exhibitions include Histories of a Vanishing Present: A Prologue, the Mistake Room, Los Angeles (2016); Afterwork, Para Site, Hong Kong (2016); GLOBALE: New Sensorium, ZKM Centre for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, Germany (2016); The Vexed Contemporary, Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, Manila (2015); and the 8th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, QAGOMA, Brisbane (2015). Her work is held in a number of collections including the M+ Museum, Hong Kong; the Burger Collection, Hong Kong; Kadist Art Foundation, San Francisco; QAGOMA, Brisbane; and the K11 Art Foundation, Shanghai.