{"status":true,"msg":{"data":{"id":56486,"auction_id":110,"set_id":144,"lot_number":"61","artist":"Hernando R. Ocampo (1911 - 1978)","title":"Dreams","starting_price":8000000,"signed_dated":"signed and dated 1961 (lower left) and titled (verso)","medium":"oil on canvas","size":"28” x 22” (71 cm x 56 cm)","property":"PROPERTY FROM THE DON VICENTE “TIKING” H. LOPEZ, JR. COLLECTION","coa":null,"provenance":"Acquired directly from the artist <br>\nLeon Gallery, The Kingly Treasures Auction 2023,\nMakati City, 2 December 2023, Lot 71","exhibited":null,"literature":null,"write_up":"Original, daring, and above all, steadfast in his commitment to his art, Hernando Ruiz Ocampo at 50 was the most important artist of his generation; and his paintings destined to be as immediate and relevant as when they were first painted decades before.<br /><br /> But it was not necessarily pre-ordained by his background. Ramon Villegas would write in his staccato style, “He was born in 1911, in the populous district of Sta. Cruz, Manila. Due to financial problems, the family moved from Gagalangin, Tondo — a petit bourgeois district — to Maypajo, around 1917. Maypajo was already on the city outskirts, located just after the boundary of Manila, in the adjoining municipality of Caloocan, where the Katipunan had deep roots in the lower classes. <br /><br />“Ocampo’s Maypajo, near the crossroads of Monumento and Sangandaan, was famed for one of Manila’s cabarets. There, as his biographer Angel de Jesus says, Ocampo “learned the rough spots of life”. <br /><br />“Ocampo, as a boy, started out shining shoes for the cabaret customers. By the age of 17, he had become the cashier there. The artist would talk of his experiences there, his dalliances with the dancers. H.R. later painted one of those wasted women beside a wilted flower, still at work in the early morning hours. <br /><br />“The family could only afford a high school education for the young Hernando at the Young Man’s Catholic Association (YMCA), Manila. Yet his father Emilio, a local leader of the Nacionalista Party, wanted his son to study law in preparation for a political career. In 1928. following his father’s wishes, Hernando enrolled in the pre-law course in San Juan de Letran, on an athletic scholarship. After a year he left Letran for the Far Eastern University, again staying only a year.” <br /><br />And then his life would take a different turn: After dropping out of law school, H.R. Ocampo would find his way into the company of an avant-garde group of writers — the Veronicans — and from there it was a short skip and jump to the fast and furious world of poets, journalists and most, importantly, artists. <br /><br />In 1951, at age 40, H.R. would found the most influential artists group that the Philippines would ever see, the NeoRealists. He would also find himself at ground zero of the Philippine Art Gallery, the first-ever to champion the cause of abstract art. <br /><br />In just ten short years, he and his band of brothers would dominate the Filipino art scene. H.R. himself would receive award after award. <br /><br /> But in 1961, H.R. himself was what his biographer de Jesus would call his “Transitional Stage”. While he had gone from one triumph after another, in his deliberate fashion, he was pondering his next move. At this crossroads, his works would move from the flat perspectives of his postwar works towards his “Mutants Period” of the mid-Sixties which were a commentary on the nuclear war and aliens that the world obssesed about. <br /><br />At the tail end of the 1950s, Ocampo joined Philprom (Philippine Promotions Bureau) then the Philippines’ largest advertising agency, where he became a top administrative officer. And with it, Villegas says, pop culture would become more and more visible in his art. The sharp contrasts between light and shadow for example, Villegas would note, was the influence of the photography of Richard Avedon (1923-2004), the mixed-media works of Andy Warhol (1928-2007), as well as the pop and 60s psychedelic art. <br /><br />Speaking in an interview in 1961, Ocampo “resolved to devote more time to painting again.” Turning 50 that year, the Art Association of the Philippines honored him with a retrospective. <br /><br />It is precisely in this year that we find the work he called “Dreams”, its title penciled in in his own hand at the back of the painting. A purposeful intellectual, H.R. Ocampo had an interest in Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud and art critics had commented on the subconscious aspects of his work and their hidden messages. His use of color and shape, in particular tapped into this world. <br /><br />With ‘Dreams’, Ocampo distills the essence of human hopes and ambitions, portraying them as dynamic energy bursting to be set free from all limits.","lot_group":"PAINTING","lot_details_html":null,"alias":null,"hp":11500000,"bp":0.2016,"isWithdrawn":0,"accounting_hp":11500000,"userBid":5926,"isPaid":0,"userId":22,"lot_status":"SOLD","isDone":1,"bid_history_id":null,"reserve_price":null,"hammer_price":13818400,"fav":0},"image":[{"id":60272,"img_url":"https://leongallery.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/v2/auction/110/144/lot/61.jpg","isFeatured":1},{"id":60696,"img_url":"https://leongallery.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/v2/auction/110/144/lot/61a.jpg","isFeatured":0},{"id":60691,"img_url":"https://leongallery.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/v2/auction/110/144/lot/61b.jpg","isFeatured":0},{"id":60689,"img_url":"https://leongallery.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/v2/auction/110/144/lot/61c.jpg","isFeatured":0}]},"increment":[11000000,12000000,13000000,14000000,15000000,16000000,17000000,18000000,19000000,20000000],"prev":60,"next":62,"count_bid":0,"bid_history":[],"tokenExpired":1}