FRIEZE LOS ANGELES 2025

Palileo’s practice is rooted in intergenerational memory, research, and embodied material experimentation. The works on view at Frieze Los Angeles are part of an ongoing, larger body of work that will appear in Palileo’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, which opens in Los Angeles on March 13, 2025.

When Palileo visited the Philippines in 2024, they were able to see and feel places that they had previously encountered primarily through family storytelling and archival documentation. These sensorial and corporeal experiences included harder-to-define contact with the myths, legends, and spiritual traditions that form an integral part of the social and natural histories animating the landscape. They also shed new light on the political realities of colonialism and globalism that shape lives and mould the ways in which histories are narrated—and silenced.

The paintings on view at Frieze find Palileo connecting with their sources and materials in many ways, often simultaneously. Each image is the record of a search, a journey to understand how the past filters into the present and how a personal sense of being in the world is in fact a collective phenomenon. The artist gives this journey, with its many different phases, immersive physical and visual form. In some instances, figures blend or disappear into their landscapes. In others, those same landscapes consolidate themselves in human form as Palileo’s brushwork splices, knits, and stitches together disparate kinds of representational strategies and approaches to mark-making. Their interest in images of figures wearing traditional clothing, many of them sourced from the Philippine history archive at the University of Michigan, stirs revealing associations. It is part of a broader effort to understand how people, particularly those who are displaced or otherwise subject to destabilising forces, weave themselves and their worlds into renewed being.

The complexity and vibrancy of Palileo’s paintings are further enhanced by their curiosity about what it means to interact with their sources—as well as their own family lineages—as someone born and raised in the United States with their own experiences of diaspora. Material interaction also plays an important role in Palileo’s process, as they often create layered, collage works on paper as a way to further manipulate and build-upon a flat image. In each of the many indeterminate, nuanced passages between objective and non-objective forms, bursts of colour, and varied painterly textures, they create spaces for celebration as well as grief, and for emotional connection as well as critical reflection. Ceramic sculptures of human and animal forms give added dimensionality to figures appearing in the paintings. Throughout these facets of their project, Palileo’s work constitutes a radically poetic mode of representing what cannot be seen, both in images that document the effects of war and the passage of time, and in the numinous landscapes where people have communed with spirits and ancestors for generations.

Maia Cruz Palileo has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Cummer Museum, Jacksonville, Florida (2023); Kimball Art Center, Park City, Utah (2022); Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco (2021); and American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center, Washington, D.C. (2019), among others. Recent group exhibitions include Seven Rooms and a Garden, Moderna Museet, Skeppsholmen, Stockholm (2023); Spirit in the Land, Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina (2023); The Outwin: American Portrait Today, Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C. (2022); A Point Stretched: Views on Time, San José Museum of Art, California (2022); and Our Blue Planet: Global Visions of Water, Seattle Art Museum (2022), among many others. Their work is in the permanent collections of institutions including the Cummer Museum, Jacksonville, Florida; San José Museum of Art, California; TANG Art Foundation, Hong Kong; Fredriksen Collection, National Museum, Oslo, Norway; Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina; Speed Art Museum, Louisville, Kentucky; and Chapman University, Orange, California. Palileo lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.