Benedicto Cabrera

Biography

In 1969 Cabrera travelled to Europe to represent the Philippines at the VI Paris Biennale. With him were Virgilio Aviado and Lamberto Hechanova. He did not go home from that trip but to London, where he stayed for many years.

He was born on 10 April 1942 in Malabon, the son of Democrito Cabrera and Isabel Reyes, the youngest of nine children. His elder brother Salvador, by then an established artist, introduced him to art. By one account he won his first prize, 100 pesos, while still at school, in the sixth grade, for a poster on human rights. In 1954 the family moved to the Bambang neighbourhood in the Tondo district of Manila.

In 1959 he entered the University of the Philippines Diliman, studied under José Joya and tried different branches of the visual arts: photography, drawing, printmaking. He received his bachelor’s degree in fine arts in 1963. While still a student he won competitions: in 1962 second prize in the Shell National Student Art Competition, in 1963 first prize in the university student council’s competition. In 1967 he won awards as a photographer at the annual exhibition of the Art Association of the Philippines. In 1970 the Cultural Center of the Philippines included him among its “Thirteen Artists”.

In London he studied printmaking at the Chelsea School of Art. The first years, as they were later described, were not easy, but recognition came fairly quickly. In 1969 he moved to London. Together they scoured flea markets all over Europe for old maps and prints of the Philippines. From this collection grew the Larawan series (the word means “portrait” or “image”), which he began out of homesickness.

In 1972 he went back to Manila and was welcomed as one of the first Filipino artists to shape the tastes of his peers. But that same year Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law, and in 1974 Cabrera left for London again, partly to escape the tightening regime. Scholars connect this event with the start of his interest in social themes, in repression and freedom; he is named as a notable figure in the protest art of the Marcos dictatorship.

In 1975 he acquired his own printing press and worked on etchings; by some accounts it was then that his printmaking reached its height. Impressions were shown at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. During his London years his paintings, drawings and prints were exhibited in the United Kingdom, Spain, Colombia, Hawaii (a retrospective at the Honolulu Museum of Art) and France, in the Paris exhibition “Six Contemporary Filipino Artists in Europe”. He travelled widely, to Peru and Yugoslavia among other places. Among his painting series the ones most often named are Sabel, Larawan, Larawan II: The Filipino Abroad and Mother and Child. Individual works that are known include “Waiting for the Monsoon” (1986), “The Indifference” (1988), “People Waiting” (1989), “Madonna with Objects” (1991) and the diptych “Studies of Sabel” (1991). The sources agree that he looked for support in late neorealism and in the abstraction of the 1960s in order to renew figurative art.

In 1985 he returned to the Philippines.

He settled in Baguio in northern Luzon, and later set up a studio and a small secluded farm on Asin Road in the neighbouring town of Tuba, in Benguet province. Together with the artist Santiago Bose, the filmmaker Kidlat Tahimik, the sculptor Ben Hur Villanueva and others he founded the Baguio Arts Guild. In these years he began working more deeply with handmade paper. After the 1990 Luzon earthquake the guild organised ArtAid, a workshop for traumatised children, and a fund-raising auction called “Artquake”. A year later Cabrera was elected president of the guild. In the 1990s he took part in creating Tam-awan Village, where local artists could work and live as a community. A run of honours followed: in 1992 the Gawad CCP Para sa Sining (the Cultural Center of the Philippines Award for the Arts), in 1997 the ASEAN Achievement Award for visual and performing arts, in 2005 a one-month residency at the Singapore Tyler Print Institute.

In 2006 President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo conferred on him the Order of National Artist of the Philippines for Visual Arts. In 2009 the University of the Philippines awarded him an honorary Doctor of Humanities, and in Tuba the BenCab Museum opened: a private museum for his own work, for the traditional art of the Cordillera and for pieces by other artists from his collection. He received an honorary Doctor of Humanities from the University of the Cordilleras as well in 2018, together with Tahimik. Among his recent projects are work with the collective Secret Fresh, which makes small statuettes based on the Sabel, Larawan and Mother and Child series, and with the British firm Rega, which uses his designs on its audio equipment.