Marina Cruz moves toward abstraction in Fractured Fabric, a solo exhibition opening October 4 at Silverlens Manila that transforms her family’s vintage clothing into ghostlike impressions and intimate details.
Family heirlooms hold stories that transcend their material form, and few artists understand this as deeply as Marina Cruz. After two decades of painting her family’s vintage clothing with photorealistic precision, the celebrated Filipino artist is taking an unexpected turn toward abstraction in her latest exhibition, Fractured Fabric, opening at Silverlens Manila this October.
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Who Is Marina Cruz?
What began as a search for gauze fabric in her grandmother’s closets has evolved into one of contemporary Philippine art’s most poignant explorations of memory and heritage. In the early 2000s, while a fine art student at the University of the Philippines, Cruz discovered her mother’s baptismal dress instead of the material she sought. This serendipitous find led her to uncover over a hundred handmade dresses her grandmother created for her children—each piece becoming a portal to untold family stories.
Cruz has built her reputation on transforming these forgotten family textiles into powerful contemporary art, creating what she calls a “family archive” that preserves the unspoken lives of previous generations. Her practice embodies a beautiful continuum of feminine creativity: her grandmother’s dressmaking, her mother’s fittings, and her own artistic interpretation. This cyclical narrative has resonated internationally, positioning Cruz as a significant voice in contemporary Asian art who looks inward rather than outward in our increasingly globalized world.
What To Expect With Fractured Fabrics
Fractured Fabric departs from Cruz’s signature hyperrealistic style, embracing the abstract qualities that first drew her to art. The exhibition focuses on patterns, textures, and minute details rather than complete garments. Visitors will encounter armhole studies highlighting the interplay of circles and pinstripes, mixed-media collages combining fabric fragments with gestural paint strokes, and ghostlike imprints of actual textiles transferred onto canvas.
The show’s most striking pieces celebrate the “scars” of these fabrics—their holes, frays, and stains—which Cruz sees as traces of her family’s endurance and vulnerability.
Fractured Fabrics runs from October 4 to November 8 at Silverlens Manila, 2263 Chino Roces Ave., Makati. An opening reception will be held on October 4 from 5 to 8 PM.
Photos courtesy of Silverlens.
