MANILA, PHILIPPINES — In 2017, the Menarco Development Corporation built what is now renowned as the healthiest corporate building in Southeast Asia: Menarco Tower. The internationally-certified, multi-awarded, 32-story landmark stands tall in the vibrant heart of Bonifacio Global City, Taguig. Equipped with cutting edge design and functionality, it also houses beautiful creations by modern Filipino artists.
The Menarco Vertical Museum inside the Menarco Tower boasts a collection of 39 works made by Filipino contemporary artists, showing everything from the beginnings of modernism in the country up to the present. It includes nearly every genre with an emphasis on recent contemporary art. The pieces are displayed through rotating presentations on each floor, and the vertical nature of the museum allows visitors to experience the collection by degrees at a steady pace floor-by-floor — as if they’re climbing up a ladder. The trip it takes to gaze at each piece indicates a clear beginning, middle, and end to the story-like arrangement of the artworks.
Here are some of the intriguing obras you’ll see at the Menarco Vertical Museum:
The Hunters Enter The Woods by Patricia Perez Eustaquio, 2016
Patricia Perez Eustaquio’s work spans various forms that include painting, installation, drawing, and textile. She was also a former costume and production designer for the ballet and avant-garde cinema. The Hunters Enter The Woods shows the status of orchids during the Victorian era. The flowers signified great wealth and opulence, so British hunters searched Philippine forests for rare orchids to sell back home. For this two-part oil painting, the artist recasts images of this object of desire to ask questions about what it means to be in pursuit of the unique, the rare, and how it answers to the human need for conspicuous consumption.
Mga Bantay ng Bayan by Alfredo Esquillo, 2017
Alfredo Esquillo is an artist known for referencing Filipino popular culture and religious motifs in his paintings and installations. Something always seems be happening in the middle of an Esquillo painting. Mga Bantay ng Bayan is based on an old photograph of a group of indigenous people from Mindanao. The region has been known for its fierce resistance to colonial powers. Through the work, the artist opens the possibility of multiple narratives by recasting them as warriors imbued by magnificent powers of sight, fire, and subterfuge. The carabao is transformed from being a docile domestic animal to a figure of defiance.
Fair Isle 59°41’20.0”N 2°36’23.0”W by Martha Atienza, 2017-2018
Martha Atienza is a Dutch-Filipino artist and community organizer who hails from a seafaring family in the Visayas. The long title for this work is after the longitude and latitude coordinates of its setting which shows an empty beach when searched for on the internet. The 63 minute video loop has no audio, serving both as meditation and documentation of a life lived beside the sea. Communities located near coastal areas feel the effects of climate change the most because of declining fish supply and devastating typhoons aggravated by poor governance. One wonders, “Who owns the land? Who owns the sea?” When we live on one planet, maybe the answer is no one and everyone.
Yuppie Turned Into A Forest Wizard by Pow Martinez, 2017
Pow Martinez’ body of work is built on exploring the dynamics of influencer culture and Philippine history through humor and a sense of the absurd. Yuppie Turned Into A Forest Wizard is painted in Martinez’ signature style of cartoonish imagery set in colorful and anonymous landscapes. The grotesque figures made to look like a hunter in a forest are the artist’s way of pondering how technology and habits of living affect the human being. It provokes viewers with questions not only about ideas of paradise and progress, but also survival in the struggle for life.
See more artworks by other Filipino contemporary artists at the Menarco Vertical Museum, located at 32nd Street, Taguig or visit the Menarco website
