{"status":true,"msg":{"data":{"id":46011,"auction_id":93,"set_id":122,"lot_number":"50","artist":"Ang Kiukok (1931 - 2005)","title":"Doors","starting_price":8000000,"signed_dated":"signed and dated 1983 (upper left)","medium":"oil on canvas","size":"45\" x 35\" (114 cm x 89 cm)","property":null,"coa":"Accompanied by a certificate issued by Finale Art File confirming the  authenticity of this lot","provenance":"Private collection, Manila","exhibited":null,"literature":null,"write_up":"A Sense of Somber Serenity From Ang Kiukok’s “Golden Period”<br><br> The 1980s are dubbed Ang Kiukok's \"golden period\" by art collectors and connoisseurs. Many of his works from this fruitful decade epitomize his further progression and maturation of his expressionist-cum-cubist vernacular, which he adopted in the mid-'60s and formally debuted in a solo exhibition at the Philippine Art Gallery in July 1966.<br><br>\n Ang's works from the 1980s are some of his finest masterpieces, stemming from his decision in 1982 to limit his exhibitions to prevent excessive public exposure. This disturbed Ang as he deemed such excessiveness to lead to unrestrained commissions that would compromise the quality of his works. Ang wanted time and only time to satisfy a personal expression that has become a religion.<br><br>\n In the preceding decade, particularly in 1976, Ang was bestowed the Araw ng Maynila Award for painting. Two years later, in 1978, Ang would receive the Outstanding Alumnus Award from the University of Santo Tomas and be commissioned by the National Manpower and Youth Council (now TESDA) for a mural known as \"Men at Work,\" now displayed at the National Museum of Fine Arts and declared a \"National Cultural Treasure\" by the National Commission for Culture and the Arts.<br><br>\n Ang's encounter with an expressionist visual language sprang from a tormenting experience in the US, where he sojourned in 1965 with his mentor, Vicente Manansala. Ang was deeply distressed by the American \"mechanical\" lifestyle: fast-paced, robot-like, void of emotions and, therefore, humanity. In New York, Ang was struck in awe by Picasso's Guernica, which he considered an awakening of his inner artistic senses.<br><br>\n With Ang's continued delving into his expressionist cubist style, he further solidified his own stature in the annals of Philippine art, a far cry from Ang's early style, which the critics deemed as mere modernist reproductions and hampered by limitations due to the lack of exposure to more dynamic artistic expressions outside the Philippine Modernist school. The work at hand, titled Doors, from Ang's golden period, encapsulates the artist's profundity in wedding expressionist and cubist aspects. A sense of agitating serenity exists, with echoes of deafening silence and an atmosphere of restless solitude piercingly penetrating throughout the composition. Vibrantly somber colors add a layer of breeziness, albeit the severity of seclusion from the outside world plays a more A Sense of Somber Serenity From Ang Kiukok’s “Golden Period” dominant role in the work. Ang's use of multiple perspectives amid a seemingly flat pictorial plane generates confusion and chaos, with the sharply delineated angles and starkness of lines emphasizing a realm of forbidding stiffness.<br><br>\n A bare landscape outside the windows reflects Ang's angst over humanity's inhumanity. Maybe he does not want to see all the cruelty man inflicts on one another? Perhaps it is that sense of anxiety about what man could be capable of? Compared with the Ang Kiukok who was always mild-mannered and soft-spoken, Ang's angst is flaunted prominently on his canvas.<br><br>\n More than his anxiety-filled experiences in America that began his expressionist stage, Ang was no stranger to claustrophobia-inducing spaces. When he was a probinsyano first-timer in Manila in the early '50s, Ang shared a cramped boarding house with three boardmates on Arlegui Street in Downtown Manila. The quartet would often sleep in breezy Luneta to escape the dizzying heat of their shared domicile. This cycle would constantly hound Ang for the next ten years. Amid the critical success of his 1966 Luz Gallery exhibit of paintings centering on machines and the mechanicalization of human life, Ang experienced downright financial struggles; he had low sales from his paintings due to the harrowing themes of his paintings. As a result, he transitioned to painting portraits for the elite in the late '60s to the early '70s, which he deemed a suffocating experience as he felt his own artistry being compromised and dumped into the void. (Adrian Maranan)","lot_group":"PAINTING","lot_details_html":null,"alias":null,"hp":12000000,"bp":0.2016,"isWithdrawn":0,"accounting_hp":12000000,"userBid":5926,"isPaid":0,"userId":22,"lot_status":"SOLD","isDone":1,"bid_history_id":null,"reserve_price":null,"hammer_price":14419200,"fav":0},"image":[{"id":45569,"img_url":"https://leongallery.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/v2/auction/93/122/lot/50.jpg","isFeatured":1}]},"increment":[11000000,12000000,13000000,14000000,15000000,16000000,17000000,18000000,19000000,20000000],"prev":49,"next":51,"count_bid":0,"bid_history":[],"tokenExpired":1}