Agnes Arellano

(b. 1949, San Juan, Philippines)

The sacred and the mythical, the physical and the erotic, the magical and the mundane, the religious and the profane, and music and song all permeate the art of Filipina artist Agnes Arellano. Drawing from rich personal experience and an extraordinary range of influences, inspirations, sources, materials, and various life experiences, she makes some of the most dramatic art in Asia. Best known for surrealist and expressionist work in plaster (cast and directly modelled), bronze, and cold-cast marble, Arellano’s work tends to stress the integration of individual elements into one totality or “inscape”. 

Arellano has been engaged in sculptures since 1983 and continues with fervour for forty years, hence, at age 75. She graduated with a degree in Psychology at UP Diliman where she returned a decade later to pursue her first love, sculpture. Though she uses clay, her material is mainly plaster, both for livecasting her own body and body parts, and direct modelling or using plaster as modelling material. Her first exhibit, Temple to the MoonGoddess, was composed of 24 white pieces in one environment which she calls an inscape, where the viewer, instead of circling around a piece, is surrounded by disparate pieces which he gestalts into the overall meaning. It is a treatise on the Feminine principle in religion, the start of a lifelong search for the Sacred Feminine and Eros, a much forbidden topic growing up in a Catholic country. She draws inspiration from comparative mythologies, world religions, archeological evidence, and science fiction. She has produced many fantasy self portraits where she merges her real life traumas or experiences into mythological characters like the multi breasted Dea to express her midlife crisis; or the headless butchered beast in Carcass Cornucopia to memorialize a botched caesarean surgery chronicling milestones where she used Art for healing.

She has participated in international group exhibitions in Berlin, Fukuoka, Havana, Johannesburg, New York, Brisbane and Singapore. Her works are in the permanent collection of the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, the Singapore Art Museum, and the APEC Sculpture Park by the Naru River, Busan South Korea.

Arellano lives and works in Quezon City, Philippines.