Roberto Chabet - Philippine Conceptual Art

 

 Roberto Chabet (1937–2013) was a renowned Filipino conceptual artist, teacher, and curator, who played a key role in the development of Philippine contemporary art. Through his expanded art practice, he supported and nurtured the artistic development of several generations of Filipino artists, from his contemporaries in the 1960s and 1970s to his numerous students at the University of the Philippines College of Fine Arts.
He is highly regarded for his experimental works, ranging from sculptures and installations made from everyday and found materials, to paintings, drawings and collages. He was the founding Museum Director of the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP) from 1967–70 and subsequently led the alternative artist group Shop 6. He taught for more than thirty years at the University of the Philippines while continuing to be involved with artist-run spaces in Manila. Chabet’s sculptures often drew on and extended conceptual ideas of relational and serial structures, using materials such as plywood for their association with the rebuilding of Manila after it was bombed at the end of World War Two, and implicating the body of the viewer into an experience of the work in space.

 

Conceptual art Roberto Chabet

Roberto "Bobby" Rodríguez Chabet (March 29, 1937 - April 30, 2013) was an artist from the Philippines and widely acknowledged as the father of Philippine conceptual art.
Chabet studied architecture at the University of Santo Tomas where he graduated in 1961. He had his first solo exhibition at the Luz Gallery in the same year. He was the founding museum director of the Cultural Center of the Philippines and served there as curator from 1967–1970. He initiated the first 13 Artists Awards, giving recognition to young artists whose works 'show a recentness, a turning away from the past and familiar modes of art-making'.
He led the 1970s conceptual art group called Shop 6 and taught for over 30 years at the UP College of Fine Arts, where he espoused an art practice that gave precedence to idea over form. Since the 1970s, he has been organizing landmark exhibitions featuring works by young artists.Chabet described his pieces as "creatures of memory" and himself as their "custodian." His works are the result of a process of unraveling of fixed notions about art and meaning. Highly allegorical, his drawings, collages, sculptures and installations question modernity. His works are meditations on space, the transitory nature of commonplace objects and the collisions that occur with their displacement.
Prolific and multifaceted, Chabet ventured into architecture, painting, printmaking, sculpture, stage designing, teaching, photography and writing.Wikipedia