Provenance: Private Collection, Madrid

ABOUT THE WORK

One cannot examine modern art in the Philippines without the mention of Zobel, whose art not only helped shape modernism in the country but also impacted a whole generation of artists — contemporaries and future ones alike; both from his generation and those who came thereafter. This work by Fernando Zobel is a minimalist demonstration of an art of austere delicacy. An abstract “subject” of absolute serenity is conjured by the pictorial surface. Reductive abstraction is the foundation of Zobel’s aesthetics. It was what his direction was over the years, after the baroque colorisms of the 1950s, and the black and white series of the early 60s. In fact, Zobel’s journey into pure non-objectivism and minimal color defined his work in the mid-1960s, wherein the gestural lines dissolve into atmospheric tonalities: delicate, precarious, and ethereal.