Provenance: Artist's collection

Literature: Duldulao, Manuel D. Twentieth Century Filipino Artists, Volume I. Legacy Publishers. Quezon City. 1995. Color Illustration. p. 156

ABOUT THE WORK

Rosario Edralin-De Lara Bitanga would be one of the youngest members of the Art Association of the Philippines, joining their ranks when she was just 18 in 1952. She would take art lessons from Galo B. Ocampo and Arturo Luz; and would finally graduate with a degree in fine arts from UST, despite the initial objections of her parents. Bitanga would forge on, having become a founding member of the Contemporary Arts Gallery with Manuel Rodriguez, Sr. She would take her masters at the Cranbrook Academy and would be recognized as one of the key woman abstract artists in the country. Manuel Duldulao has described her, in fact, as “the first female abstract artist in the Philippines.” The start of the eighties marked the dynamic efflorescence of the art of Bitanga. A convergence of factors brought this aesthetic reinvigoration into reality. What became central to Bitanga’s art was the concept of motion in a two pre-dimensional medium. Motion serves as the swaying imperative in her mature art. Bitanga accepted the fact that she was indeed working in a modified form of futurism - lyrical, graceful rhythmic. She retained the augustness of shape and agility of line as seen on this masterpiece titled Arachnid, depicting the majesticity of what seems to be a spider’s web.She always challenged herself on her ability to reduce actual realities to the barest essentials of an element into the hues that comprise visual art: lines, enclosed masses, hues that move in her philosophy of modified futurism or movement, and design, while preserving the identity of the subject. Even though presently retired, Bitanga continues to paint and has always injected new values in her works.