Provenance: Private Collection, Manila

ABOUT THE WORK

The mother nursing her child is endowed here with an earthy yet elegiac quality. For all its logic and clarity the picture remains a remarkable example of Tabuena’s powers of pictorial composition. The complexity of basic Filipino culture and its nuanced richness is one which has inspired the work of innumerable artists. So many visual elements from the mother and child to the furrowed slopes in the background are horizontally compressed into the limits of the canvas without any effect of crowding or jumbling. Tabuena’s work during his younger years is an intense and articulate exploration of many latently proletariat themes touched by quiet cultural symbols, local imagery and immediate social concerns.