Accompanied by a certificate issued by Ms. Luisa Luz-Lansigan confirming the authenticity of this lot

Provenance: The Luz Gallery, Private collection, USA

ABOUT THE WORK

Throughout his childhood and adolescence, Arturo Luz did not—not even once—show any inclination for the arts; all he ever cared about was swimming. “The idea of making art never once occurred to him,” Cid Reyes writes in his monograph on Luz. “But when it did, he was already seventeen years old and living in a time of disturbance and destruction,” he adds. In this monograph, Luz recalled the significant moment he decided to become an artist. It was during the war, a hot and lazy afternoon in their residence in Pasay, that he just, without provocation, sketched his mother’s face. “It was the very first drawing I ever made in my life. From that moment on, I said to myself: I am going to be an artist,” shares Luz. And so, be an artist, he did. When the war ended, Luz started studying art, firstly under the private tutorship of Pablo Amorsolo, brother of the esteemed Fernando Amorsolo. Their classes occur in the siblings’ residence, where the young Luz first met and basked in the maestro’s works. After this private tutorship, he went to several local and international universities to further his art studies. Arturo Luz’s artistic journey is a testament to his unwavering dedication to learning and development. He fearlessly experimented with different styles, mediums, and themes, producing a diverse range of art pieces. While his early works were rooted in realism, Luz is most renowned for his minimalist, geometric abstraction in his unique themes of cyclists, acrobats, musicians, performers, ancient pottery, and Asian architecture. Luz started to delve deeper into the world of abstraction in the 1950s. A playful scene prompted this shift in his painting style, which he witnessed during the New Year’s Eve celebration in 1952: four men riding a single bicycle. “That sight struck me as very Filipino... [it] had a sense of celebration, performance, [and] joy of life,” says Luz. That very sight resulted in his Bagong Taon, a painting of silhouetted cyclists with tooting horns on their heads—the beginning of his simplistic linear and geometric works of minimizing his figures into their most basic shapes. In the 1960s, Luz began working with his collages, characterized by sticking cut pieces of paper in different shapes on a surface and overlaying them with acrylic paint. Celebration is a testament to Luz’s unyielding talent and ingenious artistry, an incorporation of his newly developed practice and his carnival and musician themes. This 1965 collage on masonite board, despite its simplistic, geometric forms and monochromatic, washed red, and muted beige, still managed to capture the vibrant and high-spirited qualities of one’s celebration.