GalerieOne Opens With Seven Art Stalwarts

A fresh, new art exhibition space dedicated to photography and photography- based art making is now open at the fast-growing art gallery strip known as Pasong Tamo in Makati City. Dubbed GalerieOne (a division of OneWorkshop Studios), the gallery opens at 6PM on November 14, 2009 with a major inaugural exhibition featuring seven of the country's top figurative (human form) artists: National Artist BenCab, Virgilio Aviado, Fil Delacruz, Egai Talusan Fernandez, Nunelucio Alvarado, Heber Bartolome and Rosscapili. Selected with a view to embodying GalerieOne's vision, the seven featured artists represent visionary and innovative Filipino Artists who have not only built long and successful careers but continue to remain active and serve as inspirations to today's young artists.The exhibit will run until November 23, 2009.

BenCab (Benedicto Cabrera) is widely hailed as a master of contemporary Philippine art. Not long after receiving his art degree from the University of the Philippines, he embarked on a career spanning 4 decades, 3 continents and various fields of visual arts including painting, printmaking, etching, drawing and photography. Apart from the National Artist Award, BenCab has been honoured with numerous distinctions including the Gawad CCP Para sa Sining (Cultural Center of the Philippines Award for the Arts). BenCab's images, particularly of women are bold and dramatic, with their strong lines, solid colours and seemingly casual yet carefully and beautifully constructed faces.

Virgilio Aviado has been active on the Philippine art scene both as a creator and overseer. With an art degree from the Philippine College of Music and Fine Arts from the Philippine Women's University, as well as graduate studies in art from the Ateneo de Manila, Aviado has served as President of the Art Association of the Philippines and the Philippine Association of Printmakers, Director of the Coordinating Center for the Visual Arts at the CCP, and Head of the Committee on Visual Arts of the National Commission for Culture and the Arts. Primarily a printmaker who is also involved in animation and experimental filmmaking, Aviado favours simple and direct imagery in producing works with great impact on his viewers.

Fil Delacruz has been winning award after award as a painter and printmaker since 1971. After completing his art studies at the University of Santo Tomas, Delacruz pursued further art studies in New York as well as lithography in Paris. He has also held positions such as President of the Philippine Association of Printmakers, and Senior Lecturer at the University of the Philippines. His work has been exhibited around the world, with one-man shows in the US, France and Czechoslovakia, and group exhibitions across Asia, the Middle East and Europe. His muted mezzotint prints and his acrylic and pastel paintings combine elements of surrealism and symbolism with imagery that is distinctly Filipino.

Egai Talusan Fernandez is the current Head of the National Committee on Visual Arts of the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA). A graduate of the Philippine Women's University, Fernandez specialises in photography and printmaking as well as painting and sculpture. Having mounted 27 one-man shows, Fernandez has likewise participated in group exhibitions in Singapore, Spain and the US. His work has also been featured in four Philippine postage stamps and in the Manila Cathedral. Fernandez' work leans toward social realism, with its graceful and sometimes powerful human figures making direct commentaries on the burning issues of the present day.

Nunelucio Alvarado is a multi-awarded Negrense artist who studied painting at the University of the Philippines and advertising at La Consolacion College. He is the founder of Pamilya Pintura and Pintor Kulapol, a member of Bacolod Black Artists, president of the Art Association of Bacolod, and the Negros CEO of Syano Artlink. With almost 50 one-man exhibits to his credit, Alvarado is also a recipient of a 1992 Thirteen Artists Award, the Grand Prize of the 1999 Philip Morris Philippine Art Awards and a 2004 Patnubay ng Sining at Kalinangan sa Larangan ng Pintura Award. Alvarado chooses to stylize his human figures in much of his work, often universalizing or reducing their features to almost basic shapes and rendering them in vivid, expressive colour.

Heber Bartolome has a visual arts career that matches his stellar achievements as a musician. Even as he performed with various groups playing different musical instruments, he completed his art studies at the University of the Philippines and mounted several painting exhibitions. Bartolome's works on canvas reflect the nationalistic sensitivities found in his many compositions and recordings. His work tends to veer from the epic and grandiose to place the obscure and the marginal in the spotlight. With particular focus on movement, light and colour, his depictions of the human form succeed in raising the man on the street to the dignity of other canvases' gods or heroes.

Rosscapili is a painter, photographer, printmaker and art educator who is a member of the Visual Arts Committee as Executive Council of the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA), where he champions the cause of the Filipino photographer as an artist. Since his graduation from the PWU College of Fine Arts in 1981, he has been a consistent prize-winner whose latest achievements include the 2009 Ani ng Sining Presidential Award, 2008 Anvil Award, 2009 Quill Award and the 2008 PATA Gold Award for Travel Photo Journalism, in Hyderabad, India. Rosscapili's recent works blend photography and painting in the form of exquisite prints, in which the human figure is super-imposed on carefully arranged backdrops and images.

GalerieOne is at 1101 Pasong Tamo (now Chino Roces Avenue) corner Mascardo Street, Makati City (across INQUIRER). For exhibition viewing after the opening, gallery hours are from 10am to 7pm daily except Sundays.

For inquiries, call or fax 8192074 09176273193 e-mail one_workshop@ yahoo.com, or visit www.galerieone. com