Accompanied by a certificate signed by the artist confirming the authenticity of this lot

Provenance: Private Collection, Manila

ABOUT THE WORK

In 1977, Aguilar Alcuaz’s Portraits of Manila was exhibited at the Museum of Philippine Art (MOPA), showcasing oil paintings of Manila’s cityscape. Among these were paintings of various Manila bay scenes depicting the busy shipyard and serene atmospheric seascapes—all rendered in a distinct gestural hand, marked by a fleeting sense of place and time through a spontaneous and dynamic brushwork typical of Alcuaz’s works. Although having learned landscape painting under the tutelage of Dr. Toribio Herrera at the UP School of Fine Arts in 1949, Alcuaz would go on to develop a particular sense of place in his landscape paintings that drastically differed from his mentor’s Amorsoloesque naturalism: His is an impressionistic gesture that views the landscape with fresh eyes all too accustomed to the bustling cosmopolitan views of city life. Vast stretches of the urban sprawl would feature more than landscapes in his oeuvre of works, and his knack for rendering a panoramic totality of place—not only through composition, but also through the contending elements of geometric and gestural—would be carried on to his future works of naturalist scenes. (Pie Tiausas)