Rodel Tapaya

(b. 1980, Montalban, the Philippines)

Rodel Tapaya is a contemporary Filipino artist, celebrated as one of the most important painters working in Southeast Asia. His paintings are characterized by visionary narrative tableaus, melding folklore, historical and personal references into painterly figurations. By forming thought-provoking instantiations of myth and contemporary existence – such as beastly incarnations of gods beside factories and television antennas – his works are both a retelling and a continuation of the oral and pictorial tradition of his milieu. Affectingly intimate and eclectic, his process mines indigenous craft that functions as a parallel to the text and provides insight into an amalgam of pre-colonial culture and contemporary political ethos. “I just find myself looking into these folk narratives […] which lets us see a map of the future,” he has said of his process. 

Born on July 10, 1980 in Montalban Philippines, Tapaya was a student at the College of Fine Arts of the University of the Philippines when he won the Nokia Art Prize in 2001, which gave him a grant to study at the Parsons School of Design and at the University of Helsinki. After a successful series of exhibitions, he moved his home and studio to Bulacan, the Philippines in 2006 where he currently lives with his wife, the painter Marina Cruz-Garcia, and their three children. 

His works are held in the collections of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, National Gallery of Australia, Michael and Janet Buxton Collection, Mori Art Museum, The Hori Science and Art Foundation, Singapore Art Museum, Bencab Museum, Ateneo Art Gallery, Iloilo Museum of Contemporary Art, Pinto Art Museum, Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas, Deutsche Bank Collection, SEACO, and several international private collections. Tapaya was awarded the Cultural Center of the Philippines Thirteen Artists Award in 2012 and was the winner of the Asia-Pacific Breweries Signature Art Prize in 2011. 

Tapaya lives and works in Bulacan, the Philippines.