{"status":true,"msg":{"data":{"id":40210,"auction_id":63,"set_id":91,"lot_number":"73","artist":"Max Balatbat (b. 1978)","title":"Palasyo","starting_price":80000,"signed_dated":"signed and dated 2011 (upper right)","medium":"acrylic on canvas","size":"48” x 60” (122 cm x 152 cm)","property":null,"coa":null,"provenance":"with Galleria Duemila","exhibited":null,"literature":null,"write_up":"In the first decade of the new century emerged an abstractionist in the Philippine art scene with his own individual approach to space and form.  Now fast gaining a reputation as the most exciting abstractionist of his generation, Max Balatbat, also known as Maxbal, has won, as the latest feather to his cap, the Second Prize (Silver) in the Lorenzo Il Magnifico Award, as Philippine representative in the Florence Biennale in Italy, held in 2009.  Previous to this, he also won, in the same year, the Grand Prize at the GSIS Abstract Competition, and still another Grand prize at the 3rd AAP-ECCA Abstract Art Competition.  In the 2009  Philippine Art Awards, Maxbal was one of the Top Ten winners for Metro Manila.  Significantly striking is the fact that his entry was the lone abstract work in an assembly of mostly figurative and representational works.  Indeed, what attributes catapulted Maxbal to such burgeoning prominence? To be sure, Maxbals’s abstractions are a direct  reproach to Minimalism.  He restored a bristling and effervescent activity and a dynamism of pictorial inventiveness to  abstraction.  His very name augurs well: Maximalism.  His canvases teem with maximum expressiveness, not in the manner of Abstract Expressionism with its indulgent sloshing about and dribbling of dripping pigments, but with a compositional thrust marked by a sizzling configuration of myriad patterns: chequerboard, gridwork, honeycomb, polka dots, broken stretches of diagrammatic lines, each alternating or superimposed on the other.  The works resound as an amalgam of shapes redolently  obtained from the aesthetics of wallpaper, tiles, and decorative objects.  These patterns are applied on the canvas largely through stencils and silkscreens.  Recalling the techniques popularized by Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg, this  commercial process also alludes to a paraphrase of Jasper Johns’s classic phrase: “shapes the mind already knows.” The son of an architect, Maxbal was early exposed to a literal landscape of architectural diagrams and floor plans.  Observed from an aerial point of view, these designs, each layered atop another, open up from one space to another, thus engaging and entrancing the eye. “Architectural Abstraction” is Maxbal’s own coined term for his style.  A new buzz phrase, it conveys the origin of his art and conflates space design with evocative structure, but restaged on a two-dimensional platform.Maxbal is the architect of  abstraction. -Cid Reyes","lot_group":"Painting","lot_details_html":"<p><strong>Max Balatbat</strong> (b.1978)<br /><em>Palasyo Estero</em><br />signed and dated 2011 (upper right)<br />acrylic on canvas<br />48&rdquo; x 60&rdquo; (122 cm x 152 cm)</p>","alias":null,"hp":190000,"bp":0.168,"isWithdrawn":0,"accounting_hp":190000,"userBid":null,"isPaid":0,"userId":22,"lot_status":"SOLD","isDone":1,"bid_history_id":null,"reserve_price":null,"hammer_price":221920,"fav":0},"image":[{"id":39122,"img_url":"https://leongallery.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/v2/auction/63/91/lot/73.jpg","isFeatured":1}]},"increment":[70000,80000,90000,100000,110000,120000,130000,140000,150000,160000,170000,180000,190000,200000,220000,240000,260000,280000,300000,320000,340000,360000,380000,400000,450000,500000,550000,600000,650000,700000,750000,800000,900000,1000000,1100000,1200000,1300000,1400000,1500000,1600000,1700000,1800000,1900000,2000000,2200000,2400000,2600000,2800000,3000000,3200000,3400000,3600000,3800000,4000000,4200000,4400000,4600000,4800000,5000000,5500000,6000000,6500000,7000000,7500000,8000000,8500000,9000000,9500000,10000000,11000000,12000000,13000000,14000000,15000000,16000000,17000000,18000000,19000000,20000000],"prev":72,"next":74,"count_bid":0,"bid_history":[],"tokenExpired":1}