Silverlens kicks off 2025 with exhibitions in its Manila and New York galleries, and presentations in several art fairs around the world.
Silverlens will present solo exhibitions by Keka Enriquez, Yvonne Quisumbing, Norberto Roldan, Robert Langenegger, and Nicole Coson, as well as a duo exhibition by father-and-daughter artists Jon and Hanna Pettyjohn in Manila gallery; solo exhibitions by Ryan Villamael, Pow Martinez, and Catalina Africa in New York; a major cross-continental solo exhibition by Renato Orara in both galleries; and art fair presentations at S.E.A. Focus (Singapore), Art Fair Philippines (Manila), Frieze Los Angeles (Los Angeles), and Art Basel Hong Kong (Hong Kong).
‘Points and Endings’ by Keka Enriquez
Silverlens Manila, 9 January–5 February 2025
To kick off its 2025 Manila exhibitions, Silverlens presents Points and Endings, Keka Enriquez’s first solo exhibition in Manila since 2008.
In this highly anticipated return, she will show works from the 1980s, made in Manila, to the present, made in San Francisco, her home city of the last 20 years. Domestic interiors rendered in dynamic brushwork, bold colors, and innovative form, where she explores the house as both a familiar place and an aspirational ideal, will be exhibited alongside new works of dense abstract scenes which, up close, reveal figurative silhouettes—a man’s face, a child, a dog— among interiors and exteriors alike.
After 25 years of working in her San Francisco community, Enriquez returned to the artworld in 2023 with a solo exhibition at Silverlens New York. Her work will be in Silverlens’ presentation for Frieze Los Angeles 2025.
‘Sanctuary’ by Yvonne Quisumbing
Silverlens Manila, 9 January–5 February 2025
Yvonne Quisumbing’s third solo exhibition with the gallery, Sanctuary, will feature nine of the artist’s signature works: oil on aluminum substrate depicting plants abundant in the farmland.
Two hours from Cebu City lies Barangay Lugo, the farmland that the artist Yvonne Quisumbing calls her sanctuary. This is her escape from the blare of the city, where she welcomes the sounds of roosters and birds. A part of her Apothecary series, the exhibition features healing plants abundant in Lugo, particularly those well-known among the locals. These herbs symbolize hope for the rejuvenation of the land that can no longer provide its people with crops, due to the loss of support from the institutions it relies on.
‘Entangled Pairs’ by Renato Orara
Silverlens Manila, 9 January–5 February 2025; Silverlens New York, 16 January–1 March 2025
Renato Orara: Entangled Pairs is a major, simultaneous cross-continental exhibition across Silverlens’ Manila and New York galleries. This exhibition kicks-off 2025 programming at Silverlens New York.
The exhibition consists of 100 lifelike ballpoint pen drawings of everyday objects: a glove and a plastic water bottle; a teapot and a hammer; a tomato and a butternut squash. These consecutively-made renderings are paired and split from their counterparts across two continents, embodying the concept of quantum entanglement.
Orara’s drawings realize their full potential only when exhibited across geographically separated spaces, here split thousands of miles apart between Silverlens’ New York and Manila galleries. In splitting these pairs across continents, the galleries themselves become entangled and invite audiences to reflect on and reconcile the dualistic ways we see ourselves and our world. By using the parallel of quantum entanglement, Entangled Pairs tugs at the invisible threads that bind and loosen our notions of self, relationships, space, time, simultaneity, reality, while transporting us to that “space that we never visit.”
‘ISLES’ by Ryan Villamael
Silverlens New York
16 January – 1 March 2025
Presenting his first US solo exhibition ISLES, Ryan Villamael brings together new paper-cut map sculptures encased in glass bell jars with an accompanying audio component—the artist’s first foray into sound as medium.
Villamael turns to maps as both physical objects and conceptual symbols that shape our understanding of the world, exploring how they not only represent places, but also reflect our personal and collective ways of seeing and navigating our realities. Through this medium, the artist reflects on the Philippines’ history of migration, pointing to an economy shaped by decades of foreign intervention and domestic corruption.
His solo exhibition, Return, My Gracious Hour, was the opening exhibition of Silverlens Manila for 2024. Villamael’s work will be on view at Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, Germany, in March 2025.
Norberto Roldan
Silverlens Manila, 13 February–15 March 2025
Silverlens Manila will present new works by Norberto Roldan, a leading figure in the Philippine arts landscape and co-founder of VIVA EXCON (Visayas Islands Visual Arts Exhibition and Conference), the region’s longest-running biennale, and artistic director of Green Papaya Art Projects he co-founded in 2000.
After his DAAD (Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst, or German Academic Exchange Service) artists-in-Berlin fellowship program in Germany, Roldan returns with a new collection of assemblages and textile work initiated in his Berlin studio. The exhibition showcases his works that served as a visual journal throughout his residency, wherein he explored the “ethnography of the everyday.” Roldan had his first solo US exhibition, How Not to Win a Revolution, at Silverlens New York in 2024. His series of altars is on view at El Museo del Barrio’s La Trienal until February 2025.
Robert Langenegger
Silverlens Manila, 13 February–15 March 2025
Silverlens Manila will present a solo exhibition by Robert Langenegger, an artist whose work deliberately goes against moral conformity and academic technique, using images as carnivalesque allegory.
Langenegger, in his first solo exhibition with the gallery, will present his signature cartoonish narratives that turn the aesthetics of “high art” completely upside down. By combining extremely confronting humor, carnal excess, bodily fluids, and unclean protagonists, he shows us the corruption, selfishness, vanity, and sexual depravity that underlie and pervert our modern life.
Pow Martinez, ‘Finest Hour 1,’ 2024
Pow Martinez
Silverlens New York, 6 March–26 April 2025
Pow Martinez’s practice spans painting, sculpture installations, and sound. His mischievous, playful narrative canvases resemble a beautiful nightmare, blending bold colors with a cast of recurring demonic, mutant-like characters in his expressionistic, cartoonish style. For his first solo exhibition in New York, Martinez will present large-scale narrative paintings and intimate portraits that satirize the “American Medieval.”
The all-new paintings feature recognizable elements of European medieval art—banquets, fortified towers, and knights on horseback—in a contemporary, playful painterly style. Presented across a salon installation, the works read like a storybook and will be accompanied by a special sound performance by Martinez. His recent monograph written by Tony Godfrey and published by ArtAsiaPacific is available at the gallery.
Catalina Africa
Silverlens New York, 6 March–26 April 2025
For her first solo exhibition in the US, 2024 Thirteen Artists Award recipient Catalina Africa draws on landscape magic and nature energies from the West Pacific Coast of Baler, known for both its reputation as a surfer’s paradise, and its location within the Philippines’ “typhoon belt.” Resembling spells, songs, love letters, prayers, and maps, her spatial visualizations of an environment pay testimony to the Earth’s mysteries and magic.
Africa was recently awarded the Thirteen Artists Award (TAA), an awards program by the Cultural Center of the Philippines that honors young visual artists whose innovative practice has contributed to the development and expansion of contemporary Philippine art.
Nicole Coson
Silverlens Manila, 20 March–25 April 2025
Nicole Coson takes familiar objects—window blinds, oyster shells, fruit crates—and turns them in her hands, holds them to her ear, casts them in metal or crushes them under an etching press, and then lets them go. The resulting work shimmers between opaque materiality and a mysterious sense that within every mundane object is something more: a source of value, the depths of history, an essence of identity.
Coson’s forthcoming exhibition at Silverlens Manila expands this inquiry with two new bodies of work: Circuits and Vanitas. The two series here contain elements that resemble conventional forms of self-expression: the ornate patterns of the crates and thick smudges of viscous ink or the eccentric dimples and twists of the mesh casings. But these apparent signs of the artist’s hand are the result of cold mechanical processes, mere simulations of bodily expression. In an industry hungry for flesh—feeding on visions of cultural authenticity and personal depth—Coson exercises a politics of withdrawal, always slipping away and confronting us with an art of objects and machines.
Jon and Hanna Pettyjohn
Silverlens Manila, 20 March–25 April 2025
Silverlens presents the first duo exhibition of father-and-daughter artists Jon and Hanna Pettyjohn, featuring new works that highlight their individual practices.
Jon Pettyjohn, a pioneer in contemporary Philippine ceramics, has spent nearly four decades mastering high-fire Asian-style ceramics. Hanna Pettyjohn explores identity and transnational narratives through sculptural installations and paintings rooted in personal memory and the experience of diaspora.
Kawayan de Guia, (detail) ‘Transfusion: An unexplained introduction to self sacrifice,’ mixed media, acrylic on arches paper, welding, wood fiberglass, resin, and assorted objects, 2024
S.E.A. Focus
Preview: 17 January 2025; public days: 18–26 January 2025
Tanjong Pagar Distripark, Singapore
For its first art fair of 2025, Silverlens is returning to S.E.A. Focus with a duo presentation of Filipino diaspora artists Pacita Abad and nephew Pio Abad, marking the first time they are presented together in Singapore.
The presentation features a series of prints Pacita Abad produced during her three-month residency at the Singapore Tyler Print Institute (STPI) in 2003. The artist, alongside print and paper-makers at STPI, translated her rich visual language onto paper-based media and processes.
Complementing the presentation are ink on paper drawings by Pacita’s nephew and estate curator, Turner-nominated artist Pio Abad, who examines the personal and political entanglements of and within objects. Deeply informed by unfolding events in the Philippines, his work emanates from a personal family chronicle woven into the nation’s story.
Art Fair Philippines
Preview: 20 February 2025; public days: 21–23 February 2025
Booth 9, Ayala Triangle Gardens Fountain Plaza
Silverlens returns to Art Fair Philippines with a special presentation of works by over 50 contemporary artists. The works will be exhibited in Art Fair Philippines’ new location in Ayala Triangle Gardens in a presentation curated by gallery directors Isa Lorenzo and Rachel Rillo.
In celebration of the fair, Silverlens will be unveiling surprises and events in the gallery and beyond, extending the experience outside the fairgrounds. More details will be revealed in the days leading up to the fair on the gallery’s social media platforms.
Frieze Los Angeles
Preview: 20 February 2025; public days: 21–23 February 2025
Booth B15, Santa Monica Airport
For its third time participating in Frieze Los Angeles, Silverlens will present works by Filipino and Philippine diasporic artists Pacita Abad, Keka Enriquez, Kawayan de Guia, and Pow Martinez.
Together, they hold a mirror to the sprawling influence of California, reflecting a complex interplay of geopolitical histories.
Pacita Abad was radically shaped by her life as a peripatetic traveler and immigrant, raised in the Philippines before moving to the US to seek asylum from the Marcos regime. Abad’s feature celebrates her traveling institutional retrospective, which toured four venues between 2022 and 2024: The Walker Art Center, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, MoMA PS1, and the Art Gallery of Ontario. Keka Enriquez is a bridge between worlds; a star painter in Manila in the ‘90s, she exited the art world and relocated to San Francisco, until her return in Silverlens New York in 2023 with roiling abstract paintings. Her trajectory underscores California as a gateway for the Asia Pacific.
Kawayan de Guia uses indigenous and colonial artifacts, playfully transforming them into lavish and often ironic critiques of consumerism, global trade, and the impact of the American occupation of the Philippines. For Frieze Los Angeles, De Guia will present a bricolage portrait of Marlon Brando, poking at American soft colonization via Hollywood. Across the Pacific, Pow Martinez eyes California via an endless flow of ’90s films and YouTube clips. His absurd paintings satirize the menacing shadow of US pop culture. Martinez will present a salon wall of outlandish sports- and leisure-themed portraits, from basketball to boxing to cars. Alongside De Guia, a picture emerges: legacies of indigenous cultures and American colonization intertwined. Fragmented histories give birth to a new tongue of resilience and grit.
Art Basel Hong Kong
Preview: 26–27 March 2025; public days: 28–30 March 2025
Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre
Silverlens is thrilled to participate in Art Basel Hong Kong for the 12th year with a presentation showcasing 10 artists from Southeast Asia, anchored by three interwoven themes: the post-colonial landscape, the evolving relationship between humanity and nature, and the language of abstraction. In engaging with these critical issues through a distinctly Southeast Asian lens, the artists illuminate and position their cultural contexts within the larger framework of global tensions. Yee I-Lann, Citra Sasmita, and Poklong Anading excavate power and (neo)colonialism in Southeast Asia, with acuity and wit. Geraldine Javier, Pacita Abad, Catalina Africa, and Gregory Halili probe the relationship between humanity and the environment, ever in flux. Lastly, Keka Enriquez and Patricia Perez Eustaquio work through abstraction, revealing a unique South East Asian sensibility via their material-centric and process-driven approaches.
For the Encounters sector of the fair, Silverlens and Tina Kim will present works by Pacita Abad, a Filipina-American artist renowned for her engagement with globalization, transnationalism, and migration, and Pio Abad, whose exhibition at the historic Ashmolean Museum in Oxford was nominated for the 2024 Turner Prize.
For the Kabinett sector, James Clar, a light and media artist interested in new technological processes and their application to artistic narrative forms, will present works that utilize the information systems that saturate our daily existence.
