Provenance: Phillips de Pury & Company, Part II Contemporary Art, 16 November 2007, New York, Lot 371

Exhibited: Fred Hoffman Gallery, Manuel Ocampo at Fred Hoffman, Santa Monica, California, February 1991

ABOUT THE WORK

Manuel Ocampo’s striking images first garnered major attention in the 1993 exhibition Helter Skelter: LA Art in the 1990s, at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art as well as raised controversy at Dokumenta IX, providing a sense of tragicomedy. From doing an outright turnaround from mainstream art to slowly provoking censorship, Manuel Ocampo is an artist who has consistently tested the boundaries of acceptance in the fundamentally conservative Filipino art scene and society in general. In the hands of Ocampo, what was once considered low style became high art. Ocampo’s nihilistic art has consistently thrown down the gauntlet on the prude. With this nihilistic alienation, Ocampo opposed the trend of aesthetics, practiced, and thought in Filipino art. Ocampo is prepared, as no other artist, to catch both the horrors and the bitterest images in a semblance of humor. With a rapid shorthand, Manuel Ocampo paints a briskly abbreviated character. In 1998, Patrick Flores wrote about Manuel Ocampo for the show At Home Abroad (held at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco). In this spilling of seminal seed, there are profuse traces of fluids and feces, or a surplus of excrement as Ocampo depicts a negative utopia of wreckage. This becomes ultimately an eschatology of colonial baroque faith — hysterical..horrifying.