This piece is accompanied by a certificate issued by the
artist confirming the authenticity of this lot

ABOUT THE WORK

A recipient of the CCP Thirteen Artists Award in 1970 and an apparent heir to Guillermo Tolentino’s prowess in sculpting, Eduardo Castrillo is one of the quintessential sculptors of the last fifty years, with colossal monuments such as the People Power Monument along EDSA and the Bonifacio Shrine in Manila under his name. Along with National Artist Napoleon Abueva, Castrillo is a precursor of the all-metal sculpture, using embossed copper and welded brass to create figurative and abstract works that epitomize our collective yearnings and aspirations as a nation. It was his father, Santiago Castrillo, a jeweler and a master craftsman, who taught him the essence and techniques of metalworking. He is known for his ability to produce sculptures that combine Modernism’s aesthetic of the distorted figure with a classical allegorical approach to Filipino virtues. In a clip of an Associated Press from 1975, Castrillo described his reason for being: “The two extremes of art are either moving or concrete. In my style, I want to consolidate and create art that is solid and yet alive and free-flowing.” He simplifies reality into planes and occasionally augments them into a mass of resonating shapes. According to him, this is his aesthetic - both a neo-realist and a cubist propensity that “is essentially the resolution of the conflict between representation and structure.”