MANILA, MAY 17, 2013 – Filipino artist Pio Abad has taken pride of place as being one of just seven emerging artists, including Berry Patten, Heather Phillipson and Nicholas Brooks, who were chosen for a series of exhibitions – the 2013 Invites Series – in the United Kingdom.
This series gives each featured artist the opportunity to organize a solo exhibition of works crafted specifically for the series. It is organized by the Zabludowicz Collection, which was founded in 1994 by Poju and Anita Zabludowicz. The Collection aims to create opportunities for audiences to be exposed to and engage with emerging art. It spans four decades of art, from the 1970s to the present, and exhibits in the UK, Finland and the United States.
Abad is known for his distinctive artworks, crafted by his drawing on alternative or repressed historical events and brought together by utilizing particular aesthetic phenomena. His collection for the Invites Series, which features memorabilia and souvenirs sourced from North Korea and which focuses on ideology and how even everyday objects can be suffused with it, currently takes pride of place at the 2013 Invites Series and runs until May 19.
Ellen Mara de Watcher, the Zabludowicz Collection curator who brought Abad and other promising artists to the attention of the public, said that Abad’s focus on personal history and geopolitical realities and aesthetic sensibilities was what caught her eye. She added that their relative youth and the fact they they do not yet have a market meant that they could still be experimental, another high point in the eyes of the Collection.
