On March 11, HIRAYA GALLERY opens its group exhibition entitled “Daring i”, a collection of self-portraits done in various media by new and promising Filipino artists who are itinerants in the local landscapes and abroad.
Self-portraits do not make a niche to a painter, particularly while he is still young, because his facial countenance should be a litter of lumps and furrows recognized by his friends and rivals and sworn to by his detractors. In other words, a self-portrait must be a sum of the drenching chaos of life’s largesse of success, anger, and grief.
Shorn of this strong facet but brimming with the intensity of youthful statements, the eleven painters in the exhibition have wrought a collage of differing abilities and outlooks about their craft and lives.
They inform and instruct the viewers a pilfering of advocacies on the environmental degradation in the urban landscapes, the continuing struggle for liberation from the underbelly of traditional male dominance, a dissidence against the encroaching commercialization of his homeland, a demonstration of unabated anger like a hollow mask, a hammering crash of a Christian central belief as a Balinese folktale, a flagrant and explicit taunt at sexual taboos.
The show will run from March 11-31, 2012. Hiraya Gallery is located at 530 United Nations Avenue, Ermita, Manila. For information, call 5233331 or visit www.hiraya.com.
