She hits back

Maria Cruz was born in Manila in 1957. She first studied art at the University of Santo Tomas in Manila before relocating to Sydney in 1981 to attend the Sydney College of the Arts. In 1985-86 she undertook post-graduate studies at Kunstakademie Dusseldorf with Professor Klaus Rinke, and subsequently returned to Australia.

Between 1990 and 2008 she held teaching positions at Australian National University, Sydney College of the Arts and the University of Western Sydney. In these roles she taught numerous artists now held in the collection, among them: Julie Fragar, David Griggs, Fiona Lowry, Nell, Tim Silver and Gemma Smith.
She hits back 2004 belongs to a series of Yoko Ono song title paintings commenced in 2000, each of which only employ two colours and are executed on a modest-sized canvas. In the proposed painting, a song title from Ono’s 1973 Feeling the Space album is rendered in simple, red sans-serif capitals on an unadorned blue ground. Cruz has described being drawn to Ono as an artist and also as a misunderstood and “poorly accepted figure in popular culture.” Cruz's Ono paintings constitute an idiosyncratic conceptual painting project, one that constitutes an homage to the Japanese artist but which is also a set of strict parameters within which she can explore relationships between colour and language. And, moreover, each individual work has its own power as a text, ready to be deployed in wide variety of contexts.