Biography
Niles Cruz creates highly graphic mixed media works by collaging together grids of ink-jet transparencies. The original linear drawings are amplified by rich color and multiplied by copying, resulting in a visual experience that is intense, abstract, and poetic.
Cruz was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1947. His early interest in landscape painting was supported by art teachers in high school, but he considers himself a self-taught artist. He attended Wagner College, and went on to receive his BA degree from The City College of New York. In the early 1970s, Cruz connected with the nascent movement of Latino artists in New York. In 1977 he had solo exhibitions of his sculptural shaped-canvas paintings at both the Museo del Barrio and the Museum of Contemporary Hispanic Art.
For three years, beginning in 1978, Cruz produced The Pattern Painting Series, works whose complex geometry and play of bold hues anticipate some of his concerns in the current work. In the mid-1980s, the artist produced a group of Painted Plexi/Acrylic Boxes, small works in which the physicality of the paint was emphasized by the plastic support, including blister packaging. These works, with their melding of image and abstraction, connect them with Kandinsky, whose writings and modernist paintings are among Cruz’s acknowledged influences. Also important for him has been Miró, with his playful surrealism, and most recently Jackson Pollock. Cruz sees in Pollock a model for using direct, “raw imagery...accessed through his extremely straight forward methods of execution.”
From the late 1980s until the early 1990s, Cruz made strongly narrative and imagistic paintings. A series of imaginative works featured dream-like interiors, with pattern and transparent color achieved through painting, drawing and silk screening. In a number of pieces, Cruz used silk screening on canvas to array found images of ordinary objects, such as chairs, hats, and salt shakers on fields of a single color. For four years, starting in 1999, the artist continued to pursue his interest in pop culture, while the imagery became larger, cinematic, and more psychologically compelling. For the first time, Cruz was collaging transparencies of images, which were colored by painting them from the reverse side.
Late in 2005, Cruz felt the need to develop a new way of working that was more immediate, and unburdened by narrative imagery. He turned to creating mixed media works that collaged areas of boldly colored patterns. Later, using direct gestural drawings that were scanned and reproduced, he began his ongoing series of large, densely visual works that refer both to nature and memory. Many of these work have titles drawn from Dylan Thomas poems.
Niles Cruz has exhibited his work widely in solo and group exhibitions, including at the Brooklyn Museum, The Islip Art Museum, and the Hudson River Museum.
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