The Most Memorable Filipino Art Exhibitions of 2023
Here are local shows that made art-watching this year a rewarding experience.
(SPOT.ph) Great art, they say, raises more questions than answers. But what of great art shows—a fine number of which we were privileged to see this year? They’re the ones that make lasting impressions. We may remember them for a painting, or three, or for that altered state we’re compelled to slide into stepping into a room taken over by one artist’s vision.
This is a roundup of the most memorable exhibitions this year, as nominated by four avid local art watchers: one of the moving forces behind Art Fair Philippines, Trickie Lopa; collector Toto Salgado (whose IG @totosalgado takes his followers inside private collector spaces and artist studios); collector and beloved art scene figure Moira Lang; and collector Dr. Rico Quimbo whose @artspotting_mnl on Instagram is a necessary guide to art-watching in the city, training the ordinary enthusiast’s gaze towards extraordinary works many of us are wont to miss.
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Here are the 18 most memorable art exhibitions in 2023:
A Tree Is Not a Forest, Geraldine Javier, Silverlens.
Geraldine Javier usually likes to engage the entirety of an art space when she does a show, and for her latest, a tribute to the great naturalists that includes British filmmaker Derek Jarman and the slain Filipino botanist Leonard Co, she overwhelms all three exhibition spaces of Silverlens with her botanical prints and painted and embroidered fabrics. It’s a visually spectacular exhibition in which the artist slash organic farmer finds a way to tell stories that mine her own explorations of the natural world while inspiring us all to cultivate our own close relationship with nature.
Overland, Nona Garcia, Silverlens.
Long admired for her skill in lending emotion and mystery to her vivid paintings rendered from photographs, Nona Garcia makes use of this very deftness to come up with a show that unleashes new confidence and maturity. In Overland, clearly a milestone show in a prolific career, she captures what may seem to others just random curiosities—an abandoned truck, a mountain of nothing but rock and gravel—and turns them into spectacles, monuments that demand one to pull over and just stare.
The Listening Biennial, Various Artists, UP Fine Arts Gallery.
From a rattling empty kaldero that echoes the sound of hungry stomachs; to the sound of birds, crickets, and cicadas set off by touching a pattern of codes shaped like the core of a tree trunk; to words of assurance from an OFW sent to a loved one in the Philippines via voice tape, a popular mode of “love letter” in the 70s. Catching the show’s opening made for a most enjoyable, thought-provoking afternoon. Always an enriching, thrilling experience checking on our sound artists and what they’ve been dedicating time, brains, and passion to.
369, Bjorn Calleja, West Gallery.
From Quimbo: “Bjorn Calleja's art has been intriguing and curious the last decade, but this year, his art became pervasive in one's thoughts as his once quirky output seems to have acquired a patina of age and wisdom.”
Lopa: “Bjorn just keeps getting better and better. Slow and steady but he manages to build on his signature images with surprising twists that add a different dimension to what you think you’ve seen before. And I like that he’s slow and steady. Never pricing himself like the superstar that he is.”
Heavenly Bodies, Gregory Halili, Silverlens.
Quimbo: “If you thought Halili's microscopic paintings were things of wonder, these macroscopic comets blaze with their own light and histories embedded in their plasma tails.”
Elusive Edge, Various Artists, Metropolitan Museum of Manila.
A survey of abstract expressions in modem art as curated by Dr. Patrick Flores. They could have been given an entire floor to give some of the works space to breathe and some of the works (like the Lee Aguinaldo and the HR Ocampo) a sense of importance. The paintings could have been individually ID’d for the sake of visitor education. But for giving the public a chance to see rarely exhibited masterworks—like the one that appears on the poster, Noel Manalo’s sublime and playful Artwork No.12, acrylic lacquer on wood from 1979 (are they skateboards on a row? Stacked Band-Aids?)—it was memorable, truly worth the trip to the museum, and a sign of more good things to come from The M.
Poetry Has Left Me, Marion Contreras, Vinyl on Vinyl; and Kalbaryo, Melvin Guirhem, Artinformal.
Says Trickie Lopa: “I have a partiality for works on fabric - textile and thread. I find that the possibilities offered by the medium are boundless. And I am attracted by artists who continue to push its boundaries.” She mentions Geraldine Javier as an example, but also Contreras and Guirhem.
“Marion worked with tufted fabric (or thread). She had both large-scale and small pieces. Melvin uses quilting and embroidery and found textile as a means to tell his stories, usually commentaries on religion and tradition.”
See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil, Various Artists, VOCAS Baguio.
Curator and artist Kawayan de Guia spotlights the works of three “outsider artists” from the North: Clemente Delim, Eddie De Guzman, and Rogelio Guinnanoy. By “outsider” we just mean they work outside the traditional gallery landscape and were not schooled in established art institutions. Their works are alternately filled with a sense of innocence, purity and refreshing humor, as well as an intimate connection to their indigenous roots.
The Passerby, Alvin Zafra, Artinformal.
Quimbo: “Street scenes that invite one to come close and gaze into the lives of others. The fact that these night scenes are all deftly done with white stone on sandpaper is the most mindblowing detail.”
Culling of the Flock, Rocky Cajigan, Artinformal.
Quimbo: “Visceral and evocative mixed media works using indigenous textile material and objects associated with slaughter and pain attempt to contextualize cultural identities in a modern world.”
And Now We Wander Amid the Debris, Jomari T’Leon, Blanc.
Fantastic intimate portraits set in life’s melancholic in-betweens.
Idea of an Idea, Memory of a Memory, Isabel Santos, Finale.
Quimbo: “When dealing with pervasive and oppressive anxieties, drawing mountains from memory provides a distraction. But what to do if the memory itself and the required focus in drawing become the source of anxiety? Remove the memory, remove the focus, and let one’s hand draw ad libitum. How do we convey the concept in an art space? Tack the drawing bare onto the walls, and then fill the walls with the same drawing until the drawings themselves disappear into each other, into the wall, and the wall disappears into the room.”
On the Other Hand, Rolf Campos, Blanc.
Quimbo: “For this former botanical illustrator, precision was a primary requirement in his line of work. Off duty and in preparation for this show, however, Campos instead uses his non-dominant hand and creates these large-scale simple, almost child-like works that are unforgettable in their beauty and honesty.”
Mending Guide, Lara Delos Reyes, West Gallery.
Quimbo: “When no one was looking, the long lost artist comes back with a show aptly titled Mending Guide where, on video and stills, she literally sews a bird onto her hand in an act that can be seen as, well, ‘mending herself.’ Better experienced than read about for sure. More of a phoenix rising from the ashes than a resurrection.”
Unruh(e), Arvin Nogueras, Vinyl on Vinyl.
The sound artist, also known as Caliph8, assembles 10 turntables able to play on their own, with pins that serve as phonograph needles picking up “imprinted wave forms in the grooves as well as the electro-acoustic vibrations of the apparatus.”
Group Show, Roberto Chabet, Nilo Ilarde, Jonathan Olazo, Juan Alcazaren, and Oca Villamiel, Underground Gallery.
Quimbo: “Felt like a masters degree class(room) with three Chabet works standing on the dais watching his three pupils do what it is they do best.”
No Name Show 3.0, Various Artists, Gravity Art Space.
Quimbo: “Positively electric. So much creative bravura deftly curated by Indy Paredes into this thematic exploration of cutting edge art practice in the country.”