Silverlens is pleased to present the 6th edition of Collectors Plus, featuring a selection of works from the 1980s up to the present, opening Saturday, 17 May 2025 with a reception from 5–8 PM.

The oldest work in the exhibition is Pacita Abad’s Baguio Fruit, one of Abad’s earliest trapuntos, originally a tablecloth until her husband Jack Garrity spilled red wine on it. “No problem. I’ll paint it,” Abad said. Another early work of Abad, Church of Santo Domingo depicts a church in the Dominican Republic, characteristic of the artist’s peripatetic nature, drawing from her experiences living and traveling to more than 60 countries.

First exhibited in her solo exhibition Conversation 17 at Silverlens Manila in 2013, Corinne de San Jose’s prints are testament to the enduring influence of sound in her artistic practice. The exhibition’s title was a song reference, a play on the title of a song by The National: “She connects the song to the idea of suffering from oblivion, or losing identity, grasping to control how your surroundings affect you. The subjects are all concealed, completely wrapped, but there is no doubt as to what they are.”

Exhibited at Silverlens Manila in 2018, countercurrents is a collaboration between artists Gregory Halili and Nona Garcia. countercurrents shares its name with its exhibition, in which the idea of the sea is juxtaposed between diverging treatments: of scale, narrative, material. Seemingly the inverse of one another—Halili renowned for his miniature paintings on pieces of mother-of-pearl and Garcia for her massive scene paintings—both artists came together to engage in dialogue with each other and their respective practices to respond to the shared call of the seas.

Christina Quisumbing Ramilo’s works stand as tests of time, ten years apart and yet made of the same material: sandpaper. Gathered from the edges of routine, the materials speak with the work of use and of time passing; of the intimate relationship between the objects we use and the spaces we inhabit; and of the stories these everyday objects hold and the dialogues in which they partake in. The 2021 work Vicious Cycle was previously exhibited in Calle Wright, an arthouse in Malate, Manila, as part of Ramilo’s exhibition Lived/Loved where the artist explored the traces left behind of a life well-lived and well-loved.

Continuing his ongoing conversation with colonial and contemporary mapmaking, Ryan Villamael’s works are made of paper, a delicate material the artist trims, slices, and bends into various configurations that foreground questions of delineations and divisions of territory. Speaking of his recent solo exhibition is Silverlens New York, Villamael says: “Inasmuch as cartographers seek to present geopolitical reality as accurately as they understand it to be, maps turn out to be political and navigational instruments that only present partial truths, hiding the invisible realities of the marginalized in the fringes of its demarcated spaces. In a sense, maps conceal as much as they reveal.”

Also on view are paintings by Jonathan Ching, Mariano Ching, Paolo Icasas, Geraldine Javier, Hideaki Kawashima, Yayoi Kusama, Maya Muñoz, Elaine Navas, and Rodel Tapaya; mixed media works by James Clar, Gregory Halili, Bernardo Pacquing, and Luis Antonio Santos; and a lithograph by Yoshitomo Nara. 

In this edition of Collectors Plus, we find progressively creative ways in which our artists have engaged intimately with materials over the past four decades. What emerges is not merely a chronological evolution in artmaking, but a growing contemporary spirit—one where narratives converge through forms and practices that speak to diverse, lived materialities. 

Collectors Plus is on view at Silverlens Manila from 17 May to 7 June 2025.