Artland’s Daily Art Pick
Every day collectors at Artland share variety of artworks from around the world, both from their personal collections as well as pieces they’ve seen in a recent gallery opening or got inspired by on the web.
In this feature, we will be presenting you with the highlight of the day, the most interesting, inspiring or moving piece of art posted in the app in the last days together with name of the collector who shared it.
Check the collector’s profile in the app to see their entire collection!
About the artist
Manuel Ocampo (b. 1965 Philippines) currently lives and works in Manila, Philippines and in Luxembourg. Ocampo has been a vital presence on the international art scene for over twenty years and is now the most internationally active contemporary artist from the Philippines.
Ocampo is known for fearlessly tackling the taboos and cherished icons of society and of the art world itself. During the 1990s, he was noted for his bold use of a highly charged iconography that combined Catholic imagery with motifs associated with racial and political oppression, creating works that make powerful, often conflicted, statements about the vicissitudes of personal and group identities. His works illustrate, often quite graphically, the psychic wounds that cut deep into the body of contemporary society. They translate the visceral force of Spanish Catholic art, with its bleeding Christs and tortured saints, into our postmodern, more secular era of doubt, uncertainty, and instability.
Of late, his works have featured more mysterious yet emotionally charged motifs that evoke an inner world of haunting visions and nightmares. Ocampo’s earlier fascination with religious symbols, now reappear alongside some of his more personal, idiosyncratic motifs, such as teeth, bones, and fetuses. The subdued palette of greys, blacks, and whites seen in so many of these works heightens the feeling that we are looking into a nocturnal dream world, one that we can see only obscurely, as if through a veil. It is a world that invites the viewer to enter, but at his own risk, offering no comfort, but perhaps some promise of redemption.
(Text via mariekirkegaard.com)