PROPERTY FROM THE PAULINO AND HETTY QUE COLLECTION

Provenance: Acquired directly from the artist

Literature: Roces, Alfredo R. Kiukok: Deconstructing Despair. Finale Art Gallery. Mandaluyong City. 2000. p. 88 Bunag Gatbonton, Esperanza. Kiukok. Paulino O Que. Manila. 1991. p. 173 *This lot is a full donation to the Metropolitan Museum of Manila from Mr. and Mrs. Paulino Que

ABOUT THE WORK

Despite having a name with the felicitous meaning of “Savior of His Country”, the rise of Ang Kiukok was hardly meteoric. Neither quick to ascend nor fleeting, Ang’s career instead shone bright without much ado until he was in his 45th year. Born in 1931 in Davao City, he would enroll in the University of the Santo Tomas at the ripe old age of 21 but would quit mid-way through his course in the School of Fine Arts. His teachers would include the dean Victorio Edades as well Vicente Manansala, both staunch members of the abstract movement in the 1950s. Manansala would take him under his wing and the two would become fast friends. Ang would be introduced to his mentor’s circle of journalists, poets and other artists, including his group called the Neo-Realists that included HR Ocampo and Cesar Legaspi. Ang would exhibit in the Philippine Art Gallery, the first outpost exclusively devoted to modern art, but eventually gravitated to the Luz Gallery established by Arturo Luz (another PAG alumnus) in 1959. In the 1960s, he would exhibit assiduously at the Luz five different times in the decade. He would famously travel with Manansala to Los Angeles in 1965 to visit the museums and galleries and then later to venture to New York on his own. Here, he would confront Pablo Picasso’ opus Guernica and admit that it would be a life-changing if not career-altering experience. It would result, according to the critic Manuel Duldulao, “in a psychic shock from where would come his signature series of surrealistic landscapes, grotesque figures made of machine parts, spiky Christs in agony, snarling cats, howling dogs and shrieking people.” Upon his return, he would found alongside HR Ocampo, Malang, Yonzon, Asuncion and his friends Manansala and a fellow artist from Davao Ong Bungian, the cooperative Gallery 7 in Makati. It would be patterned after one of the Philippine Art Gallery’s more popular features, which was a sort of “pop up” or mini-exhibits. He would show watercolors on rice paper from late April to May of that year. The following year he would be included in Luz Gallery’s landmark show Twenty Years of Philippine Art and then at a subsequent exhibit at the CCP Gallery called Contemporary Philippine Art, and again at the CCP for a major retrospective entitled The Fifties. In 1976, when he had become 45, he would be featured as the cover story in the influential AsiaWeek Magazine. It has been quoted as describing him as “a mild-mannered expressionist”; who lived in Quezon City “with his wife, four children, three dogs and assorted flowering plants” — all of these subjects were of course recurring themes in his works. He said at the time that he was “resigned to the fact that he would never be a popular artist.” Nevertheless, AsiaWeek proceeded to declare him the “new Amorsolo” — referring not to the Maestro Fernando’s style, it said, but to the new-found saleability of his works. Ang Kiukok had most definitely arrived He would also receive the patronage of the eminent collectors Paulino and Hetty Que. Mr Que would publish a landmark monograph on Ang Kiukok in 1991, entitled Kiukok, the Artist and his Works by Esperanza Buñag Gatbonton. Table with Avocados is a donation in full from Paulino and Hetty Que, in support of the new building of the Metropolitan Museum in the Bonifacio Global City, it is part of a series of still lifes by Ang that he began in the 1980s and that featured tabletops, drawers opened and closed and a variety of Filipino fruit. In this case, seven green avocados are the only curvilinear forms in an otherwise angular composition. A yellow door shut close gives it an even more intriguing dimension. In 2000, Ang Kiukok would hold his first retrospective at the Met — and thus, the work at hand brings him full circle, on the 20th anniversary of his declaration as Philippine National Artist for the Visual Arts this year.