Having lived in Manila, Sydney and Berlin, Maria Cruz avoids being bound to a single identity. Educated in all three cities, Cruz presents a composite of sources and outputs in her practice, moving between figuration and abstraction seamlessly, adopting and rejecting traditions where it suits, and retaining others.

Cruz’s paintings act as an autobiography, cataloguing these influences and environments – embraced or overcome. As a student of Klaus Rinke at the Staatliche Kunstakademie in the 80s, Cruz’s debt to this school of German painting is apparent. The Kunstakademie Düsseldorf has a strong history of abstract painting and conceptualism and an alumnus that includes Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke, Joseph Beuys and Blinky Palermo.

Maria Cruz has always had an enduring fascination for colour theory; she makes her saturated colours work hard. Inner Green is an ode to green, with the full family of possible hues hand-mixed and built up in successive layers of thinned oil paint.

‘I was at a museum looking at a famous Flemish flower painting. I bought a postcard of the same flower painting. The postcard travelled with me wherever I went and ever since, I’ve been working on this painting, Inner Green, with a feeling that I was bestowed with a certain disposition’ – MC