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

Provenance: Provenance: Private Collection, Muntinlupa City

ABOUT THE WORK

Over the decades of his career, Ang incorporated into his painting a repertory of themes that are unmistakably domestic in character. The simplicity of the arrangement, the enjoyment of the appearance of food, and the homeliness of the setting suggest a side of his which is opposite the angry angst-filled image his name usually conjures. Still life was a staple of Ang’s work. His catalogue raisonne lists scores of canvases attending to arrangements of fruit, objects, and the like on the table, large or compact. Characteristically, the table-top on which they are laid is stretched downward, flattened out in an overview, with the contents presented upright in their most familiar aspects. But this work is more of a close-up view of the objects cum food served on the table. The otherwise commonplace subject has been reduced to an almost abstract arrangement of tone and line. The artist emphasizes the cubistic visual tricks here: the illusionism of the fruit is undermined by overlapping the cut-out sections, somewhat obscuring the boundaries of the images. Throughout his career Ang Kiukok was to remain faithful to the cubist base of his aesthetic; his work developed from simplified, precise forms based on the world of objects, to monumental, emotional compositions.