Material Inspirations, a new exhibition running up to Dec. 8, 2024 at the Metropolitan Museum of Manila | The M, brings together for the first time two women artists who have shaped the trajectory of modern art in the Philippines.
Anita Magsaysay-Ho and Nena Saguil lived lives that intersected at many points. Both born in 1914, they were classmates in the fine arts program of the University of the Philippines, graduating in the same year, 1933, under the directorship of the master Fabian de la Rosa. Both blazed a distinct path and developed their own individual language of painterly expression, pursuing art with remarkable spirit despite the constraints of an art world and a society entrenched in patriarchy.
Both furthered their studies overseas, Anita at the Art Students League in New York and the Cranbrook Academy in Michigan; Nena in Paris at the Ecole d’Art Américaines at the Château de Fontainbleu and the Académie de la Grande Chaumière.
Anita was the only woman in the mythical circle of Victorio Edades called the Thirteen Moderns. Nena claimed her place among men in the seminal exhibition of non-objective art at the Philippine Art Gallery in 1953.
Patrick Flores
Curated by Patrick Flores, the exhibition puts these two formidably talented women side by side and explores the media through which the artists expressed their distinct sensibilities: egg tempera for Anita, and pen-and-ink for Nena. Through careful attention to these media and the techniques by which they are animated, the modernism of their art becomes more intimately and deeply felt, rendered in forms that gain luminosity and depth.
“Anita and Nena were intuitively committed to their personas as women and artists, turning to exemplars in European art such as Brueghel and Kandinsky, and devoting their time to the trance-like completion of form with finesse, conscientiousness, and vitality. They were grounded in the fields and atmospheres of memory and fantasy wherever their fascinations took them, whether quaint or abstract, in a marketplace of teeming smoked fish in Manila, or in an ascetic attic in the heady cosmopolis of Paris.”
Material Inspirations opened to the public November 9 and runs until Dec. 8, 2024.
VENUE: 3/F South Gallery Metropolitan Museum of Manila
REGULAR VIEWING: 09 November 2024- 08 December 2024
Tuesday-Friday: 11 AM-6 PM
Saturday-Sunday: 10 AM-6 PM
Closed on Mondays and public holidays
