The sixth edition of Collectors Plus features a selection of works from some of the country’s most captivating visionaries, spanning the 1980s to today.
This May 17, 2025, Silverlens will be taking viewers on a tour of Philippine art from the 1980s to present day with the launch of Collectors Plus 2025. Already in its sixth edition, the exhibition will feature the works of some of the country’s most exciting artistic voices over the past few decades.
In this edition of Collectors Plus, the gallery explores the progressively creative ways in which its artists have engaged intimately with materials over the past four decades. What emerges is not just a chronological evolution in artmaking, but also a growing contemporary spirit—one where narratives converge through forms and practices that speak to diverse, lived materialities.
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A Glimpse Of The Featured Works At Collectors Plus 2025
The oldest work in the exhibition is an early painting by Pacita Abad, “Church of Santo Domingo,” depicting a church in the Dominican Republic, characteristic of the artist’s peripatetic life, 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 is a play on the title of The National song, “Conversation 16.”
“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,” the gallery writes.
Exhibited at Silverlens Manila in 2018, countercurrents is a collaboration between artists Gregory Halili and Nona Garcia. The work “countercurrents” shares its name with its exhibition; here, the idea of the sea is juxtaposed between the diverging treatments of scale, narrative, and material. Halili is renowned for his miniature paintings on pieces of mother-of-pearl, while Garcia is known for her massive scene paintings. While they appear to be the creative inverse of one another, both artists respond to the shared call of the seas through a dialogue that melds together their respective practices.
Christina Quisumbing Ramilo’s works stand as tests of time, ten years apart yet made of the same material: sandpaper. Gathered from the edges of routine, the materials speak of the intimate relationship between the objects we use and the spaces we inhabit, as well as 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.
“Collectors Plus” is on view at Silverlens Manila from May 17 to June 7, 2025. Silverlens Manila is located along 2263 Don Chino Roces Avenue Extension, Makati City, and is open from Tuesdays to Saturdays, 10 AM to 6 PM.
Photos courtesy of Silverlens Galleries.
