Angela de la Cruz's solo exhibition "Upright" at Birmingham's Ikon gallery presents a collection of broken and mended artworks. Her canvases are crumpled, folded, and snapped, while sculptures are assembled from precarious junk like a three-legged chair on a stool and a piano stacked atop another. The works, though appearing on the verge of collapse, are all repaired and propped back up, reflecting a state of post-collapse resilience.
The exhibition is a powerful reflection of the artist's own physical experience. De la Cruz uses a wheelchair following a stroke, and her art embodies a process of mending and adapting. The works, which engage with modernist tropes like monochromes, ultimately convey humor, frustration, and profound humanity. They tell a story of perseverance, of being patched together and forced back to verticality, mirroring the artist's own resilience in the face of bodily adversity.