SINGAPORE.- Singapore Art Museum is presenting Maria Taniguchi: Afterimage, the first monographic museum exhibition of the acclaimed artist in Singapore. Taking its title from visual sensations that linger in a viewer’s field of vision, Afterimage highlights recurring concerns that run through Taniguchi’s practice, including repetition, time, and labour.
The exhibition is anchored by Taniguchi’s “brick paintings” (2008–ongoing), towering canvases made by individually filling hand-drawn rectangular cells. Rather than a deliberate response to the art historical legacy of modernism, the brick-like geometric pattern that repeats across Taniguchi’s canvases reflect the embodied process of their own production. The subtle shifts in colour that accumulate across these surfaces document the days, weeks, or months devoted to each painting. Untitled and unnumbered, Taniguchi’s “brick paintings” are best understood as individual parts of a single artwork that continues to grow with each new addition to the series. Originally trained in sculpture, Taniguchi leans these canvases precariously against the gallery walls, blurring the boundaries between the flat surface of the painting, the canvas as a sculptural object, and the architecture of the gallery.
In Runaways, Taniguchi distils sculpture to its most basic forms, using circles and straight lines “drawn” in three-dimensional space. Carved from the wood of Java plum trees, known in the Philippines as duhat, the sculptures carry deeply personal associations of the artist’s mother who craved the fruit while pregnant. The dark violet fruit of the Java plum evokes the deep colours of Taniguchi’s canvases, while the use of duhat wood in her sculptures rejects the tradition of minimalist sculpture by incorporating personal biography and embracing craft rather than industrial production.
Four video works made between 2010 and 2026 demonstrate the development of Taniguchi’s relationship to space and materials. The earliest video in the exhibition, Mies 421 (2010), captures various structural details of the 1929 Barcelona Pavilion, designed by German architects Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich. The work features black-and-white still images that change in time with an accelerating metronome, creating a sense of increasing anxiety. Figure Study (2012) returns to Taniguchi’s focus on artistic labour, documenting two workers digging a hole in the jungle. The irregular sound of their tools offers a counterpoint to the tick of the metronome while the clay they extract from the ground represents the possibility for future creation. This creative act is realised in Figure Study (2018), which depicts the making of a clay object and its final form. Using deeply saturated red and blue images, the video foregrounds process, transformation, and the act of making art.
A newly commissioned video, A painter, if black were a place (2026), shifts focus to the artist’s mother, herself a painter, through pixelated digital images of her home, garden, and paintings. Interrupted by fields of black—hand painted by Taniguchi—which function as negative space inserted into the image, the work brings her subtle, non-representational painting style into dialogue with her mother’s canvases. Together, these videos deploy the framing device of the camera and the screen to suggest our limited views of history, memory, labour, and the legacy of modernism.
