Fresh and new, undiscovered talents breaking into the scene and making waves are referred to as “up-and-coming.” The artists on this list aren’t necessarily unknown; in fact, most of them have been working continuously for the past few years. They’ve been pounding the streets, carving out a name for themselves in the art and design industries. Their works are fascinating, tough, and unexpected, which is why they’re on this list. These are ten Filipino artists who you should keep an eye on since they are the shape of things to come.
MARTHA ATIENZA
Atienza was born in Manila to a Dutch mother and a Filipino father and won the Ateneo Arts Award in 2012 for her video work Gilubong ang Akon Pusod sa Dagat (My Navel is Buried in the Sea). She is interested in researching experimental narratives that examine the divide between the commonplace and the fantastic in everyday life as a filmmaker and visual artist. At the moment, Atienza is concentrating on the impact of modern art on social change.
OLIVIA D’ABOVILLE
D’Aboville is a Filipino-born French-Filipina sculptor who studied tapestry and textile building at Duperré, a prominent Textile Design school in Paris. She is fascinated by natural architecture and the richness of our seas’ biodiversity. D’Aboville’s art weaves complex structures that resemble identifiable biological forms out of commonplace things, producing surprising and astonishing outcomes. Sacred Geometry, her most recent exhibition in Makati, addresses the limitless iterations found in natural patterns and shapes.
TENGAL DRILON
Drilon’s work is presented with the goal of experience and interaction. He is a Filipino sound artist, composer, musician, curator, and filmmaker. Drilon’s work confronts the interplay of sound and picture, a juxtaposition that leads to striking comparisons, using several methodologies. He is the creator and director of Sabaw Media Art Kitchen, a non-profit organization that connects and exchanges new media artists in Southeast Asia. Sabaw develops a platform for digital culture and the interface of art and technology through events, seminars, conversations, and forums.
KRISTIAN HENSON
Graphic design is undeniably art, even though it is frequently disregarded. Filipino-American Kristian Henson is a contemporary graphic designer whose work surpasses any visual artist working today, with a distinct aesthetic and taste beyond many in his sector. There’s no doubt that, with his schooling from the Art Center College of Design and the Yale School of Art, he has the expertise and craftsmanship to silence any doubters. Henson has collaborated with Swindle Magazine and American artist Shepard Fairey and has received the coveted Art Directors Club Young Guns Award. Henson most recently produced the layout for the printed edition of The Manila Review’s second issue in the Philippines.
WINNER JUMALON
Jumalon, who won the Cultural Center of the Philippines’ 13 Artists Award, is no stranger to such lists. Jumalon’s recent paintings, which he just exhibited at Art Basel HK, try to tap into the collective experiences of family and friends, as well as himself. His unsettled portraiture explores moments of suspense and drama, amplifying the unsaid tensions between subject and observer.
HANNA PETTYJOHN
Pettyjohn’s complex paintings are evocative and melancholic, shifting between longing for the past and the intensity of the present. He is best known for portraiture. She explores the location of her family history, the interaction and interstice between Americans and Filipino in deeply personal paintings. Her vision of the United States and her family informed these large-scale paintings, which were based mostly on her experience living in Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas. We are confronted formally with shapes and objects that appear disassociated from their original meaning in Pettyjohn’s most recent series of paintings from her show The Glass Between Us, presenting a system of ambiguity and uncertainty.
CHRISTINA “GOLDIE” POBLADOR
Poblador is a painter, glass sculpture, and installation artist who is fascinated by how natural and man-made processes affect our surroundings, effectively depicting the sublime, beautiful, and awful. Poblador is now on view as part of the Goethe Institut’s Riverscapes: Influx traveling show. She was invited to make works with many other Southeast Asian artists that looked at the cultural implications of environmental change in river-bordering communities. She graduated from the University of the Philippines, Diliman, with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting and will begin graduate studies at the Rhode Island School of Design in the United States this fall.
MARK SALVATUS
Salvatus is a multidisciplinary artist living in Manila. His art operates within the field of site-specificity, elaborating on the truth, actual, and imagined aspects of the terrain. His art seeks to reconfigure the binaries of urban existence, such as those between person and space, self and community, by doing so. He’s also the director of the 98B COLLABoratory, which aims to bring artists, architects, curators, writers, musicians, filmmakers, educators, researchers, performers, and students together with the general public. The current mission of the laboratory is to connect and invite local artists to revive locations that embody Metro Manila’s history and legacy.
SHIREEN SENO
Shireen Seno, a photographer, and filmmaker was born in Tokyo and reared in both Japan and the United States. Seno has worked for renowned Filipino filmmakers John Torres and Lav Diaz and holds a Bachelor’s degree in Architectural and Cinema Studies. Big Child, her 2012 feature film, is a coming-of-age narrative of a boy and his family in 1950s Mindoro after the Philippines were liberated by the Americans. Seno’s video, like most of her photographs, depicts a Filipino family struggling against the tides of history and colonialism.
COSTANTINO ZICARELLI
Zicarelli, a Filipino-Italian artist born in Kuwait, describes himself as a failed graffiti artist and musician. He says he strives to merge his failed attempts into more fascinating visual shapes, having earned a degree in advertising from the University of Santo Tomas’ College of Fine Arts and Design. Zicarelli’s most recent graphite drawings are stunning scenes that combine his reality with contemporary subcultures and deviant, macabre imagery in a medium of delicate complexity. Zicarelli’s art produces often-illogical associations that question, confront, and investigate. He is best known for monochrome works, whether drawing, painting, or installation.