Meet the Artists: Maria Taniguchi

Series Meet the Artist by Art Basel
Featuring Maria Taniguchi
Publisher Nowness

From a quiet studio in Manila, Filipino visual artist Maria Taniguchi works across sculpture, video, and painting, reflecting her upbringing in the Philippines, as well as wider cultural and conceptual contexts. Emphasizing materiality and construction, Taniguchi channels structure and discipline into expansive compositions that record time, labor, and attention for her ongoing ‘brick’ series – with each painting comprising a grid of hand-painted rectangles, carefully drawn in pencil then filled by hand, one by one.

Attributing her understanding of light and shadow to her early life in Dumaguete City, Taniguchi references a fascination with darkness specific to life on the island in the 1980s, and the electricity shortages that had her finishing homework by candlelight. “In Manila, every corner has light, and the quality of light at night is different,” the artist says of her current home city. “In Dumaguete, once it gets dark, it’s pitch black, so the quality of black is different.”

Inviting Art Basel and director Karl King to her studio for the profile series Meet the artists, Taniguchi expands conversation about her ever-evolving brick project two decades on, and the process of repetition and renewal, exploring infrastructure as a symbol of physical development and cultural expansion, mirroring the nuances of her landscape and community.