This piece is accompanied by a certificate issued by Finale Art File confirming the authenticity of this lot

ABOUT THE WORK

Among the modernists, Ang Kiukok was the artist who utilized the creation of still lifes to its fullest. Beginning with linear forms in austere gray, and brown of textured surfaces, over the years, he transitioned to a more complex and bright-colored cubist still lifes of tabletops containing fruits, potted plants, or bottles. Generally, Ang’s still lifes breathe a hint of emotions of both spirituality and anxiety. His still lifes charts Ang’s journey from his Modernist Period to his Machine and Expressionist-Cubist period. While this branch of Ang’s work is often overlooked, it won’t be possible to think of the modern artist without his body of still life paintings. Ang Kiukok, at times, would venture so far from the visual appearance of actual objects that his painting would seem thoroughly abstract, and yet in other works, he would produce an image which was almost representationally literal: emaciated people, howling dogs, junkscapes. Whether in abstraction or figuration, Ang Kiukok produced works that were so powerful in feeling and so imaginative in design that they evoke not just visual suggestions, but meticulously structured details. In this particular work, the highly charged colors generate an immediate emotional response. Painted in vibrant colors, the agitated forms, zigzag in all directions, making complex, usually cubistic, shapes. Patterns start becoming more apparent, Ang Kiukok’s Picture Window of Nature suggesting structures similar to the walls within buildings. The painting is, in a way, disorienting with its all-over design and the absence of perspective, testing the imagination with its intersecting planes and forms that seem to jut out of the picture plane. As a young man, Ang did comical sketches and also studied Chinese ink and brush painting methods. His traditional brush paintings were highly influenced by those of Chinese master Qi Baishi; he also copied movie advertisements from newspapers. He then took on formal training under premier artists Vicente Manansala, Victorio Edades, Diosdado Lorenzo, Jose Garcia Llamas, Carlos “Botong” Francisco, Galo Ocampo, Virginia Ty, and sculptor Francesco Monti. A representative of Asian engagement with Cubism, Vincente Manansala, who had famously studied under Fernand Leger, bore a strong initial influence on Ang Kiukok. The student, who would also eventually become a National Artist, would come into his own inimitable style by the mid-1970s with works characterized by tight pictorial organization, strident colors and fragmented, severely angular forms, which evoke the torments of a world of constant struggle and uncertainty.