Galería Tomás March is proud to present the most recent work by the Philippine artist Manuel Ocampo in an exhibition titled “Guided by Sausage or Setting the Course for the Embarrassing Theme”.

Born in 1965, Ocampo studied Fine Arts in the Philippines and the USA in the early 1980s. He has coupled his art practise with teaching at Berkeley, University of California, 2000-2001, and later at the YerbaBuenaCenter for the Arts in San Francisco from 2004-2005.

Ocampo is currently residing in the Philippines. That said, over the last few years he has spent considerable time in Spain and in Italy, and as such we can notice the influence of their different cultures, symbols, emblems and fetishes in his provocative and irreverent paintings.

His work has been exhibited in galleries in New York, Paris, Berlin, Munich, Barcelona, Madrid, Vigo, Seville, San Francisco, Luxembourg and Mexico City, among others. Also worth underscoring is his participation in Documenta IX in 1992. His paintings are part of the collections of museums like MNCARS (Madrid), IVAM (Valencia), MOCA (Los Angeles) and the FukuokaAsianArt Museum (Japan).

Very much to the fore in this show is the concept of excess seen through a prism tinted with scatological references, a predominant aesthetic of pinkish hues and a menacing underlying humour. The burlesque and satirical spirit brings to mind the genre of political caricature, rife with social critique and successfully implementing a grotesque effect that will leave no one indifferent.