Lot 43 | Auction XX

LOT 43

R.M. de Leon
B. Philippines, 1960

Face is Stranger Than Fiction (Chihuahua in the sweetest and prettiest acid wash colour), 2009

Signed on lower right

Exhibited in Valentine Willie Fine Art       

Gallery label affixed on reverse

Acrylic on paper

122 x 150 cm

Provenance Private Collection, Kuala Lumpur

RM 2,000 – RM 3,000


“From the start I thought I was creative,” de Leon recalled. “I copied images from magazines and collaged them on the walls.”

“It’s hard to sell my works, and I don’t know why,” he said. “Some say because they’re on paper. But it is precisely that: The medium is the message. It is not whether it is on paper or canvas. It is whether it is art or not.”

Born in 1960 in Manila, Ramon Manuel de Leon graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts from the University of the Philippines in 1984, and on that same year, held his first solo exhibition at the Cultural Center of the Philippines. His early works were greatly influenced by Roberto Chabet. He was a recipient of the Cultural Center of the Philippines Thirteen Artists Awards in 1990. He was the Philippine representative to the 3rd Biennial in Bangladesh and was part of the Manila-Berlin Exchange Exhibit at RAAB Gallery in West Berlin in 1988.

His career spanned 31 years bagging in between different awards and grants. He was one of the 1990 Cultutral Center of the Philippine’s 13 Artists awardee and was the first Filipino recipient of the Vermont Studio Center scholarship for studio arts program for painting in the U.S.A. He is currently an Art Educator at the De La Salle-College of St. Benilde.