Alliance Française de Manille presents artist-printmaker Ambie Abaño in a solo exhibition at the Alliance Française Total Gallery.

“Surface” is Ambie Abaño’s thirteenth solo exhibition since 1988. From award-winning effulgent greens and blossoms in her younger years, we see her bloom into printmaking as she investigates the capacities of materials and permutations of a subject matter common yet inexhaustible.

“Surface” is the most recent fraction of Abaño’s anthology of faces. Fashioned in the character of woodcuts, she cuts through, prints and paints onto various ground surfaces a set of portraits depicting how serenity, grief, surprise, reflection and the comic pass through a face in all possible rearrangement of these expressions.

The illimitable and repetitive aspect of this series of faces carries with it a mere portion of the permutation of faces.  Likewise, “Surface” examines two dichotomies: one is that of a theme that allows the detail and macro of an individual’s make-up to encounter each other, while the other reintroduces the artist’s painting sensibility with her facility of making both paint and woodcut occupy the same surface.

Abaño has been the President of the Philippine Association of Printmakers since 2007. She graduated from the University of Santo Tomas with a Bachelor of Science degree in Architecture and is pursuing her Masters in Fine Arts Degree at the University of the Philippines where she also currently teaches at the Department of Studio Arts. In 2006, she won the grand prize in the Philip Morris Philippine Art Awards for her explorative print on textile. Her works have been exhibited in New York, Yogyakarta, Chamaliers in France and various venues in the Philippines.  She has recently been awarded the first residency grant of the Alliance Française de Manille-Philippine Artist Residency Program (AFM-PARP) which will enable her to experience a 2-3 months’ artist residency in France.

The exhibit runs from February 8 to 24, 2011.

Alliance Française de Manille is located at 209 Nicanor Garcia St. formerly Reposo St.) Bel-Air 2, Makati City, Philippines

Gallery days and hours:
Monday to Thursday, 9am to 6pm; Friday, 9am to 5pm; Saturday, 9am to 5pm; and closed on Sundays and Holidays.