Join Ocampo and Joyce Toh, Senior Curator of Singapore Art Museum, as they elaborate on the artist’s distinct visual language developed at STPI – a collaboration through which he continued to employ symbols and iconography that straddle between the familiar and the arbitrary.
Multiple award-winning painter Manuel Ocampo (b. 1965, Philippines) is known for his frequent and strategic stylistic drifts in response to new contexts and subject matter. His shows are often constructed around contradictory tendencies, elaborating discrepancies between what a painting appears to be and how it behaves in relation to the structures that legitimate its appearance. He always embraces sudden shifts of style and emphasis. He paints, but doubt is created as to whether any particular medium is the solution.
The artist has been a vital presence on the international art scene for over two decades now; his works were presented in two of the most important European art events, Documenta IX (1992) and the Venice Biennale (1993). In the early 1990s, he participated in the iconic exhibition “Helter Skelter: L.A. Art in the 1990s” at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1992).