{"status":true,"msg":{"data":{"id":60720,"auction_id":203,"set_id":236,"lot_number":"9","artist":"Arturo Luz (1926 - 2021)","title":"Celebration I","starting_price":400000,"signed_dated":"signed (lower right)
dated 1980","medium":"white collage","size":"48\" x 36\" (122 cm x 91 cm)","property":null,"coa":"Accompanied by a certificate issued by Ms. Luisa Luz-Lansigan confirming the authenticity of this lot","provenance":"Acquired directly from the artist","exhibited":null,"literature":null,"write_up":"A painter, designer, printmaker, and sculptor, Arturo Luz was one of the leading lights in Philippine art history. His artistic journey results from his unwavering dedication to learning and development. Despite starting drawing at age seventeen and at a time of disturbance and destruction, Luz nevertheless worked toward his goal of being an artist. He experimented with different styles and mediums and explored various themes, producing diverse art pieces—sketches, oil and acrylic paintings, sculptures, and many more.
In Cid Reyes’s monograph on the artist, Luz reminisced on the specific moment he decided to become an artist. It was during the war, one hot and lazy but rather fateful day in their residence in Pasay, that he just, without provocation, sketched his mother’s face. “It was the very first drawing I ever made in my life. From that moment on, I said to myself: I am going to be an artist,” shared Luz. He said it with so much conviction that, soon after the war ended, Luz started studying art in earnest.
Studying in the time of Amorsolo and being mentored by his brother Pablo, Luz’s early paintings adhered to traditionalism. In the 1950s, he delved deeper into the world of abstraction—the beginning of his simplistic linear and geometric works, minimizing his figures into their most basic forms—and created his celebrated Carnival series. This style was the precursor to his later shift to minimalism, where he abandoned figurative painting and embraced a more straightforward, linear form with a limited palette.
The 1960s marked another shift in Luz’s painting style. This time, he began working with collages, characterized by sticking cut pieces of paper in different shapes on a surface and overlaying them with acrylic paint. In this period, Luz also started transitioning to pure non-objective art. The work at hand, Celebration I, was a white collage work from 1980. Here, Luz depicted the rather solemn quality of a celebration, a stark contrast to his usual celebration and carnival-themed works that burst with colors. Against a clouded white background, Luz placed two squares–black and gold–in the middle with arbitrary splatters of black paint across the canvas. Notably, his chosen palette added a sophisticated and elegant allure to this piece.
As a person, Luz resembles his paintings: quiet, unassuming, witty, and profound—quite a combination of his parents’ characteristics. Moreover, his skilled utilization of space came from his mother, an intelligent interior designer, despite being unable to go to college. “Using common sense, she would turn anything into an object of beauty… Everything she did showed a certain elegance,” says Luz.
While Luz’s earlier works were rooted in realism, his succeeding paintings took a bold leap into abstraction, culminating in his distinctive geometric style. His oeuvre became known for its straightforwardness, characterized by linear forms and a restrained palette. His matted, minimalist compositions of bare spaces punctuated by linear forms have earned him a place among the most sought-after Filipino artists. In 1997, Arturo Luz was bestowed a National Artist for Visual Arts Award, the country’s highest accolade in the arts. (Jessica Magno)","lot_group":"PAINTING","lot_details_html":null,"alias":null,"hp":1500000,"bp":0.2016,"isWithdrawn":0,"accounting_hp":1500000,"userBid":34,"isPaid":0,"userId":34,"lot_status":"SOLD","isDone":1,"bid_history_id":19091,"reserve_price":0,"hammer_price":1802400,"fav":0},"image":[{"id":66735,"img_url":"https://leongallery.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/v2/auction/203/236/lot/9.jpg","isFeatured":1}]},"increment":[900000,1000000,1100000,1200000,1300000,1400000,1500000,1600000,1700000,1800000,1900000,2000000,2200000,2400000,2600000,2800000,3000000,3200000,3400000,3600000,3800000,4000000,4200000,4400000,4600000,4800000,5000000,5500000,6000000,6500000,7000000,7500000,8000000,8500000,9000000,9500000,10000000,11000000,12000000,13000000,14000000,15000000,16000000,17000000,18000000,19000000,20000000],"prev":8,"next":10,"count_bid":0,"bid_history":[],"tokenExpired":1}