Since its founding in 2004, Silverlens Galleries Manila has steadily built a reputation for spotlighting the country’s variety of artists. By providing a space for the works of creatives such as Allan Balisi, Corinne De San Jose, the late Pacita Abad, and more, Silverlens’ Manila outpost has emerged as an important platform for contemporary Philippine art.
This November, the gallery presents two new solo exhibitions that continue its commitment to pushing the country’s cultural scene forward.
The gallery presents “Eight Views From the Border,” artist Carina Santos’ first solo show with Silverlens. Santos, who hails from one of the Philippines’ most prolific art-making families and is now based in the United Kingdom, is set to showcase her series of “pour paintings,” which features evocative abstract paintings that use shape, texture, and chance to evoke shifting terrains and skies. “The exhibition sees the artist working with a new confidence,” reads the gallery’s official announcement, “revealing a hard-won new language for painting that harnesses all the learnings from her past lives while taking the long view on her practice.”
Running concurrently with Santos’ show is Poklong Anading’s “lumalalim sa kababawan, lumulutang sa kalaliman,” the artist’s fifth solo exhibition with Silverlens. Anading, who is a winner of the 2006 Thirteen Artist Awards and the 2006 and 2008 Ateneo Art Awards, uses different media in his exhibition — including objects, video, photographs, and drawings — to comment on the local marine life and man’s impact on it.
Taking inspiration from his own experiences in diving with volunteers and marine biologists and in initiatives to restore coral reefs and their habitats, Anading centers his exhibition on the “ghost net,”an object used to catch fish and later fend off trash being swept to a nearby shore. Anading takes these nets and transforms them into synthetic corals, as “an homage to the life forms they disrupted and as a large sculpture to accentuate the paradox of the situation… interventions of man-made objects against a world that ultimately intervenes with everything that is man-made,” reads the gallery’s official announcement.
Both solo exhibitions will officially open on November 20 and will be the gallery’s last shows of 2025.
