NEW YORK, NY.- Albertz Benda announces Jigger Cruz: Smudging Dirty Little Touch, an exhibition of new work by Filipino artist Jigger Cruz. This exhibition marks Cruz’s first solo show in the United States and features never-before-seen paintings from the artist’s latest abstract series. For his New York debut, Cruz has taken his work in an entirely new direction; moving away from his signature representational backdrops, and utilizing automatic gestures to create bold, impasto paintings that are both visually and conceptually abstract.

Cruz’s latest works attempt to transcend the anxieties and minutia of daily life by focusing solely on the process of aesthetic experimentation. The result is a new, expressionistic series where Cruz takes a ‘pause from telling stories’ and allows process to become the context of the work.

Despite making every effort to sublimate himself through his work, the presence of the artist is deeply felt through the physical application of the materials: the bold marks made with pigment and tubes of oil paint, scissor gouges in the canvas, sawed out corners of the frame, and sometimes streaks of bright spray paint, carry visible traces of Cruz’s gestures.

“I have sought to reach the limitations of knowledge that lead to automatism. It’s a matter of abstraction and using my natural senses and gestures to create an object. It’s about raising questions of curiosity in the process of creating something new from muscle memory. It’s a curious process that allows the possibility to fall into a new form of language.”

Jigger Cruz (Filipino, b. 1984) lives and works in Manila, Philippines. Cruz studied Fine Arts at the Far Eastern University in the Philippines and Design at De La Salle-College of St. Benilde. He has exhibited widely throughout the Philippines and internationally, including “Southeast Asian Abstraction: A New Dialogue,” at Sotheby's Singapore and “A Book About Death” at the Emily Harvey Space, New York, NY.

His work can be found in multiple public collections, among them Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; The Dikeou Collection, Denver, CO; Saatchi Collection, London, UK and Zabludowicz Collection, London, UK.