January 10 – February 21
Pablo Gallery, South of Market Residences
Taguig
Pablo Gallery opens the year with an exhibit called Autonomy Warriors by Australian artists David Griggs and Rene Sinkjaer. David Griggs had been based in Manila since 2005 and had been documenting subcultural scenes from prison gangs, tattoo artists, skateboarders, and other denizens of the gutters of urban Manila, straightforwardly depicted where their scars and wounds and pus ooze and gape wide open for their visceral truthiness, at times incorporating some of these images onto his paintings that are colorful pastiches from his subconscious psychogeographic meandering of the streets of Manila. This time, he focuses his lens on skater girls of Cubao, girls that are on the verge of womanhood but inundated by the bruises of their sport, defiant of the usual dainty images of girlhood.
Rene Sinkjaer only began to paint in 2004 after he migrated to Sydney from his country of birth of Denmark, tapping belatedly the keen curiosity and fascination for art he’d been harboring since he was a kid. His paintings are seemingly autobiographic scenes from a life of an artist depicting scenarios such as an artist’s garage sale, graffiti painting in the shower stalls, an orgiastic party, the interior/parlor of a collector/ eccentric. These are rendered naïf-like in bright colors, he paints minimally a narrative that unfolds in each viewing – maybe macabre, maybe based on something real, maybe entirely from imagination, yet belying a gravity of pathos despite the brevity of strokes, and directly quoting Philip Guston who has said of painting as “autonomous, pure and for itself, therefore we habitually analyze its ingredients and define its limits. But painting is ‘impure’. It is the adjustment of ‘impurities’ which forces its continuity.”
This would be Sinkjaer’s first time to exhibit in Manila.
Both artists will be present at the opening on the 10th of January, Saturday at 6PM.
David Griggs will also be releasing on the opening his book Warriors, a collection of photographs which comes as a 38 page hardbound book in 20 limited editions.
The exhibit Autonomy Warriors will be on view until the 21st of February.
