ABOUT THE WORK

Ronson Culibrina juxtaposes traditional approaches to art with contemporary styles, exploring the many possibilities between the inherent contradiction between the conservative and the avant-garde. Culibrina confronts power dynamics in art history in this piece revolving around Fernando Amorsolo’s bathers. Amorsolo’s depiction of an idyllic countryside scene and ideal native beauty was challenged by the flourishing of modernist art in the country, disputing the then-prevailing notions regarding aesthetics and iconography. By the 1950s, the artists associated with the aesthetics of Amorsolo – the Amorsolo School – would establish an inter-generational community that would be later associated with the commercialization of artistic production. Using the backdrop of Amorsolo’s bucolic scenes and ideal rural feminine, Culibrina appropriates elements from the works of foreign contemporary artists: Yue Minjun’s “laughing man,” Yayoi Kusama’s polka dots, and Jeff Koons’ Michael Jackson and Bubbles (1988). These artists have been similarly associated with this pattern of art commercialization. Culibrina confronts the complexities of global and local orientations of modernism, as well as the seemingly irrevocable interdependence of contemporary art to the market. As Lisa Ito notes in the essay Market Intersections in the Art of Ronson Culibrina, “It thus becomes a challenge to fill in its discursive gaps: to interrogate these processes and phenomena within art history and to weigh how Philippine contemporary art has served as a critical mode towards introspection and interrogation of the continuing past.”