A COUPLE'S EXHIBIT
Art Cube Gallery was more packed than usual as power art couple Elmer Borlongan and Plet Bolipata held a joint exhibit at their Makati gallery.
Borlongan presented some beautiful oil-on-canvas paintings in his “Hanap Buhay” show, depicting jobs of everyday Filipino workers. His wife Bolipata showcased recent mixed-media works on canvas in her “Imaginary Playmates – Frida Kahlo & Diego Rivera” show.
Borlongan studied fine arts, majoring in painting at the University of the Philippines Diliman and was a member of artist groups Salingpusa and ABAY, later organizing the artist collective Sanggawa and collaborating on mural projects commissioned locally and internationally. He is a recipient of numerous awards including the Thirteen Artists from the Cultural Center of the Philippines in 1994, artist-in-residence for ARCUS in Ibaraki, Japan and Metrobank’s Award for Continuing Excellence and Service (ACES) in 2004. His pieces are represented in the collections of the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, the Tokyo Museum of Contemporary Art, Singapore Art Museum, BenCab Museum and Pinto Art Museum. He had a major solo retrospective, “An Extraordinary Eye for the Ordinary,” at the Metropolitan Museum of Manila, which resulted in a beautiful two-volume art book. Self-taught in printmaking, he reconnected with printmaking since the pandemic in 2020.
Bolipata, born 1962, graduated from St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in the US with a degree in computer information systems in 1984. She started her career as a self-taught artist and later, took some drawing and painting classes at the Art Students League in New York. She was granted the Freeman Fellowship at the Vermont Studio Center in the US in 2006 and was a recipient of the Natividad-Galang Fajardo Award from the Ateneo Library of Women’s Writings in 2012. She shares that she has explored different mediums and techniques that included painting in oil, watercolor, sculpture, filmmaking and mosaics. She reveals that the pandemic has brought an incredible change in her work. Isolation the past two years has helped her get reacquainted with her fondness for painting in oil and the feeling of uncertainty has allowed her to become more daring and experimental with her style, trying her hand working with metal sheets and gold leafing. She also took to painting in watercolor and was able to overcome her fear of the medium.
The art couple currently lives in Zambales.
I love the works of these two wellrespected artists and have been to their solo shows a lot but for the two to have a joint show is something special. It was a treat to see their amazing works in a single setting. Congratulations, Emong and Plet! ***
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