{"status":true,"msg":{"data":{"id":50126,"auction_id":99,"set_id":131,"lot_number":"38","artist":"Arturo Luz (1926 - 2021)","title":"Cyclist","starting_price":6000000,"signed_dated":"ca. 1955-1958 \nsigned (lower right)","medium":"enamel on board","size":"30\" x 20\" (76 cm x 51 cm)","property":null,"coa":"Accompanied by a certificate issued by Ms. Luisa Luz-Lansigan \nconfirming the authenticity of this lot","provenance":"PROPERTY FROM THE FRANCISCO J. NAKPIL COLLECTION","exhibited":null,"literature":null,"write_up":"The Architectural Luz by LISA GUERRERO NAKPIL
\n\nArturo Luz (1926 - 2021) burst onto the Filipino art landscape with a jolt of blinding talent, a sort of comet that lit up the sky but that would, however, evolve through the years into the steady glow of a morning star.
He would return to Manila in 1952 after study abroad in both the United States and France. Luz would first complete a three-year course at the California College of Arts & Crafts in Oakland followed by studies at the Brooklyn Museum of Art School. He spent another year in the Parisian Academie de Grande Chaumiere.
In that same year, he would have his first solo show in Manila — and would also win first prize for the work Bagong Taon which featured three merrymakers on a joyride on a single bike under a pale New Year’s Eve moon. It would make his particular visual language of pared-down figures famous as well as his fascination for cylists and men in motion.
His cool, spare works distilled the brave new mid-century world and he joined the exclusive roster of the Philippine Art Gallery, the first establishment to champion exclusively the cause of non-objective art. (In fact, later in the year, Luz was elected as the president of the Art Association of the Philippines, which one concludes kept him out of the running for the AAP’s competitions until 1955 when he once more scooped up the first prize for Procession.
The work at hand is from that golden age. Luz depicts a figure on a bicycle, not hurtling to a particular destination but literally climbing the walls. He perches almost transfixed, steadying himself by holding onto the ceiling. The figure is boxed into a room, with the kind of walls Luz would use for his Carnival series. One can imagine the fellow as one of the characters from the circus, a juggler or clown or mime. Luz has put him in a field of green, the kind of pale chartreuse that was the palette of the mid-century.
It is a painting that would have instantly appealed to the architectural mind of Francisco Nakpil, a man in a room defined by a floor and a ceiling.","lot_group":"PAINTING","lot_details_html":"
Arturo Luz (1926 - 2021) Cyclist ca. 1955-1958 signed (lower right) enamel on board 30\" x 20\" (76 cm x 51 cm)