Jose Joya (1931 - 1995)
Alay (Offering)
signed and dated February 15, 1976 (lower right and verso)
acrylic on canvas
34" x 34" (86 cm x 86 cm)


Accompanied by a certificate issued by Mr. AlexanderRichard Joya Baldovino confirming the authenticity of this lot
PROVENANCE:A gift from Senator Helena Benitez to Luis YuloAcquired from the above by Atty. and Mrs. Ricardo Blancaflor



In 1951, when the Philippine Art Gallery was officially founded, José T. Joya was all of 20 years old. He was enrolled at the University of the Philippines School of Fine Arts and had become a member of the Art Association of the Philippines. Joya would come full circle in the 1970s when he would ascend to become the dean of that very same college at the U.P., shepherding the next generation of artistic luminaries from 1970 to 1978. Joya was selected as one of the featured artists in the P.A.G.’s first international exhibit, the Philippine Cultural Exhibition, which opened in two venues in New York City and a third in Washington D.C. from September 1953 to March 1954. He was described in the catalogue as “probably the youngest artist in the P.A.G. group” and was certainly one of its most applauded, having represented the Philippines in an international art students exhibition in Philadelphia in 1952 as well as besting the Shell National Competition for students that same year. He graduated from U.P. in 1953 and thanks to the support of P.A.G. and its influential members such as Fernando Zobel, he received various scholarships in Spain as well as the United States. For Joya, the best was yet to come as he continued to ascend the heights in the 1960s. First, he was elected president of his beloved Art Association of the Philippines from 1962 to 1965. Next, in 1964, he was amid the movers and shakers of the XXXII Venice Biennale — the same year that Robert Rauschenberg would be the first American to take home the Golden Lion and the first year that the Philippines would be invited to participate. (Only one other Asian country, Japan, had national exhibits, marking the Philippines own rise in the region.) José Joya would take centerstage in many such international festivals and events but would always retain a resounding Filipino outlook. In response to a renewed Filipinism of the period, he began to take inspiration from the important discovery of the Manunggul Jar —a pre-colonial receptacle depicting the ship of the afterlife and inscribed with curvilinear scroll designs. It was discovered and excavated on the island of Palawan in the southern part of the Philippines in the late 1960s. It was mystic, powerful, and uniquely Philippine. The shapes and forms of this national treasure would be “adumbrated into a series of paintings — so struck by the originality of these design of these ancient relics” was Joya, wrote the cover notes on a similar piece in this series, called more directly, Manunggul Vessel, in The Philippines Quarterly, December 1971, (Volume 3, No. 4.) In the work at hand, titled Alay (Offering), Joya has masterfully evolved that first concept to what would become his recognizable blocks; here, still swirling together like waves in a vortex of the patterns to be found in the original Manunggul Vessel. Fiery reds and golds tempered with the purity of white match the mood of Joya’s most pursued artworks. (Lisa Guerrero Nakpil)