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On the 22nd June 2006, renowned sculptor
Duddley Diaz will be conferred the Award “Patnubay
ng Sining at kalinangan” in the field of Sculpture.
Awarded by the Office of the
Mayor of the City of Manila, it formally recognizes
Diaz’s achievement in the Arts and his contribution
to Filipino Sculpture. Galleria Duemila, who has
exhibited Duddley Diaz since the mid 1990s, had
mounted a small exhibition of his sculptures
stretching from 1982 to the present, including both
cast bronze works and Diaz’s signature carved wood
icons and wall reliefs.
In celebration of Diaz’s
achievement, Galleria Duemila has turned the gallery
over to sculpture this month. Juxtaposing the
minimalist sculptures of Roberto Robles with
newcomer, Chilean sculptor Carolina Montero, and set
against a backdrop of Tony Twigg’s recent timber
wall constructions and paintings. This cornucopia
of ‘sculptural styles’, although individually
disparate, has a sympathy between the work, each
with an intuitive understanding of materiality.
Duddley Diaz’s sculptures often
have a religiosity or rest in the celebration of the
living form. They have a grounded, ‘earthy’ quality
to them, however this sense of weight is moulded
under his hand into the graceful. Diaz figures with
their full bosom, swollen bellies, heavy hands and
feet, speak of a simple life. Just like his series
of ‘owls’ with their wide telling eyes, they are
imbued with a feeling of truth and wisdom.
Galleria Duemila introduces the
work of Carolina Montero, a young Chilean artist
currently working in Lima, Peru. Jumping between
terracotta, cast bronze and mixed media, she is
drawn to the tactile and malleable quality of
material. Montero’s sculptures have a sense of
movement and spontaneity, like figures emerging from
wet clay their half-articulated forms finesse us
with an ambiguity and elegance.
Roberto Robles pushes his
expression to a state of Zen minimalism through
metal, marble and paint. He adds a quiet elegance to
this small collection of sculpture and one could
argue, an unspoken dialogue of abstraction between
his pure forms and those of Tony Twigg with their
verticality and geometric abstraction. Robles’
elegant rusted industrial shards are like totems to
fine art, somewhat lofty and reaching in the gallery
space and sitting in quiet contrast to Diaz’s
grounded figures.
Tony Twigg, the Australia in
the group, challenges our perceptions of sculpture
flirting with space through a positive and negative
play between 2 and 3-dimensionality. This recent
body of work takes his familiar timber constructions
and ‘converts’ them to canvas – an improvisation
dancing between found wood and painted line.
Diaz, Montero, Robles, Twigg –
four sculptors, four visions. This exhibition is a
celebration of an artist’s love and adept handling
of material – its e\weight, its pure form, its
abstraction and its ability for expression. This
exhibition is a refreshing detour from the current
plethora painting.
For exhibition enquiries,
please contact the gallery through Mimi Santos or
Beth Manuel at 831-9990 telefax 833-9815 or email
duemila@mydestiny.net |
