Pag-saka ng Katagalugan
The Red Deer Route
Identity in Post-sculpture Works
Roberto M.A. Robles
March 14 – May 9, 2020
Opening reception
14 March 2020, Saturday | 6 PM
UP Vargas Museum | 1F Galleries and Landing
Jorge B. Vargas Museum and Filipiniana Research Center, Roxas Avenue, University of the Philippines, Diliman, 1101 Quezon City, Philippines
The University of the Philippines Vargas Museum, in partnership with Galleria Duemila, opens the solo exhibition of Roberto M.A. Robles, Form | Kata Prototype, at the 1F Galleries and Landing on 14 March, Saturday, at 6 o’clock in the evening.
Roberto M.A. Robles returns to the UP Vargas Museum with the exhibition Form | Kata Prototype, a conceptual continuation of Tagalog at Taga-ilog mounted eight years past. Perceiving the metaphysical universe to be beyond the realm of figuration, Robles executes his minimalist post-sculptural forms in marble mined from the marble-rich mountains of Teresa, Rizal. The rough and unfinished metamorphic rock is hewn simply – into cubes, a cross, a cuboid, and escombro (debris) – belying the semiotic depth drawn out by Robles. Form | Kata Prototype is a proposal of Tagalog identity, a dissection of form to reveal layers formed by periods of intense heat and pressure: primordial beginnings and migrations evidenced by petroglyphs, fossils, and oral mythology, colonial conquest and revolution, political unrest and radical cultural shifts, and the contemporary milieu. The exhibition is an invitation to formulate Filipino counter-narratives, casting off the cultural dominance of the current Euro-centric world.
Visual artist Roberto M.A. Robles hails from Tuy, Batangas and has been an active artist for forty years. He graduated from the University of the East in 1980 then completed his MFA in Sculpture at the University of Tsukuba, Japan in 1995. He has exhibited at the Cultural Center of the Philippines, Yuchengco Museum, UP Vargas Museum, at Alliance Francaise (France), the 17th Asian International Art Exhibition (S. Korea), Tokyo Metropolitan Museum (Japan), and at various other exhibitions in Chile, South Africa, and Australia.
Form | Kata Prototype will be on view at the 1F Lobby, West Wing, and 1F Landing Galleries of the UP Vargas Museum until 9 May, 2020. A related exhibition, Form | Ode Katha will be on view at Galleria Duemila from 7-31 March 2020.
For more information, please contact Vargas Museum at (+632) 8981-8500 loc. 4024 (UP trunkline), (+632) 8928-1927 or send an email to vargasmuseum@up.edu.ph. You may also check our website at http://vargasmuseum.upd.edu.ph, Facebook via https://fb.me/vargasmuseum.upd and Twitter via @UPVargasMuseum for updates.
