LANDMARK EXHIBIT OF CHABET’S WORKS ON VIEW AT THE CCP ON JANUARY 19-MARCH 31, 2011
Roberto Chabet’s To Be Continued is a landmark survey exhibition of Chabet’s plywood works that was first presented in the Institute of Contemporary Art, Singapore - La Salle College of the Arts last January 2011. The exhibition returns to Manila as the final installation of Chabet: 50 Years, a year-long series of exhibitions organized by King Kong Art Projects Unlimited to celebrate Chabet’s fifty years of pioneering conceptual work as an artist, teacher and curator.
The exhibition gathers for the first time the seminal trilogy, Russian Paintings (1984), House Paintings (1986) and Cargo and Decoy (1989), as well as other works that utilizeplywood boards, a material, which has become not only the surface and support of his paintings and installations, but to a large extent their subject matter and content. He first used plywood in his early kinetic sculptures in the 1970s, but it was in the 80s when he adapted the material to painting. Breaking away from the rigid formalism of Modernism, his seemingly ‘purely’ geometric and abstract plywood constructions are often juxtaposed with particular everyday objects that would appear and re-appear in his other installations and become part of his familiar inventory of anxious objects. Also included in the CCP mounting are his China Collages (1980 – 1990) and Bakawan (1974), two works that were previously exhibited in the CCP. Highlighting process and the provisional nature of theseworks, the exhibition illuminates a key aspect of Chabet’s practice, which gives precedence to the fugitive and contingent nature of art.
Roberto Chabet was born in 1937 in Manila and held his first solo exhibition at the Luz Gallery in 1961, the same year he graduated from the University of Sto. Tomas with a degree in Architecture. He was the founding Museum Director of CCP where he initiated the Thirteen Artists in 1970, supporting young artists whose works show “recentness and a turning away from the past”. After his brief tenure in the CCP, Chabet led the seminal alternative artist group Shop 6, and taught for over thirty years at the University of the Philippines College of Fine Arts in Dilimanand at key artist-run spaces in Manila. Since the 70s, Chabet has been curating landmark exhibitions of vanguard works by young and emerging Filipino artists. He is the recipient of the JD Rockefeller III Fund Grant (1967- 1968), the Republic Cultural Heritage Award (1972), the Araw ng Maynila Award for the Visual Arts (1972), and the CCP Centennial Award of Honors for the Arts (1998).
Roberto Chabet’s To Be Continued will open on January 19, 2012, 6pm at the Cultural Center of the Philippines and will be on view until March 31, 2012. To Be Continued is organized by King Kong Art Projects Unlimited in collaboration with CCP and with the support of Manny O’s I Love Wines. For further information, contact CCP at tel. no. (632)832-1125 loc 1505-06, or visit the website www.kingkongartprojects.org.
(Source: culturalcenter.gov.ph)
