Manila’Bang Show 2024 and its Standout Gallery Exhibtions

The Manila’Bang Show 2024 happened between November 14 to 17 at SPACE at OneAyala. The new venue gives artists and galleries an opportunity to showcase their art at the heart of the Makati Central Business District.

With that in mind, BluPrint takes you on the ground of its opening day. Many galleries came out in full force during the four days of the fair, exhibiting the best of contemporary Filipino art today. Here are some of the standouts, whether in artistry or in methodology. 

Artistry and Beauty

Unique exhibitions of different galleries’ offerings proliferated during the Manila’Bang Show 2024. A mix of local and international galleries found themselves showing off their roster of artists, highlighting unique aesthetic aspects. 

The North Side Art Collective, for example, highlighted the more steampunk aspects of their members’ sculptures. Here, pop culture figures like Iron Man or C3P-O and R2D2 utilize visible wires, a general copper sheen in its colors, and steampunk favorites like gauges to present them as things in the midst of being created.

More exhibits from galleries focused on beauty in artistry and how we define it. One exhibit, Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder from Galerie Anna, presents four different visions of womanhood from four different artists. 

Cesar Arro’s paintings, for example, use paint blotches and experting blending to abstractly put their subjects together with the environment around them. Karen Castrillo-Villasenor, meanwhile, creates these blindingly-dynamic sculptures of women in movement, portraying a joy in their actions and litheness.

Showcasing Art from Abroad

Art Anton’s exhibition for Manila’Bang 2024, meanwhile, celebrates a graceful kind of beauty through the works of Leeah Joo, who painted silk and fabric textiles with an impossibly-light texture within them, and Hironori Kiyoshima, who created these detailed body sculptures from metal. 

Speaking of foreign artists’ contributions to the art fair, Platinum Gallery Korea exhibited interesting paintings from artists like Lee Sang Won, who painted a landscape of people from a bird’s eye view, or Kim Mi Suk and Lee Jae Hyun, whose individual contributions are portraits that veered towards the comical and cartoonish.

Unique Filipino Aesthetics

Other exhibits for the Manila’Bang Show 2024 highlight new subjective perspectives in how we depict forms and ideas. Dry Brush Gallery, for example, exhibited mixed media works by Justine Vasquez, whose art depicts a hyper-realistic birds’ eye view of islands and shorelines, complete with boats and waves of water mid-crest.

29 Kapitolyo Space mixed in sculptures and paintings for a varied portrait of Filipino life. It features paintings from Christian Regis, who has a hazy, almost-abstract style which portrays the hustle of city life and the heat wave that permeates through it. Honesto Guiruela III’s sculpture depicts a towering behemoth of bahay kubos precariously stacked up together.

Going Beyond Aesthetics

Altro Mondo Creative Space’s Cross Currents is one of the more unique exhibitions due to its mix of sculptures, paintings, and mixed media works from twenty-seven different artists. The exhibit is interesting because of how it appears to have this unifying theme attempting to dissect an anxiousness with the artworks featured.

From the lightboxes by Wika Nadera depicting a person in the midst of a dance, to paintings by Luong Trung or Lorebert Maralita, to a rice sculpture appearing to mock the constantly rising prices of foodstuff in the country, the combination seems to ground the fair-goers to a kind of social consciousness not prevalent in other exhibits. 

Tahanan Pottery Shop & Studio stood out from the other galleries as a place that current and budding artists can use to learn and create different pottery pieces. They showcased a lot of finished works from artists who have worked in their studio, highlighting not just the utility of pottery, but the almost-limitless possibilities of the artistry that abound from it.

Spotlighting Contemporary Art in Manila’Bang Show 2024

Galleries have an important role within the Philippine art scene not just as places to cultivate artists’ talents and works, but as helpful curators giving space to new ideas and knowledge. The Manila’Bang Show 2024 highlights this role well, as these galleries contribute their own perspective of contemporary art and how it benefits us as a people.

Photos by Elle Yap.

Related reading: Luzon Art Fair 2024: New Talent and Unique Artworks for Second Year

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