Aba Dalena
Published March 09, 2021
Coming from a family of celebrated artists, Aba Lluch Dalena has been an artist all her life. An art teacher, a painter, a sculptor, a poet, and a musician, Abad has been honing these passions for over 30 years. She has exhibited around the world as a visual artist with respected museums acquiring her work as part of their permanent collections. For instance, some of her pieces can be seen in the collection of the famed Pinto museum in Antipolo. To date, she has had 15 solo exhibitions and many more group exhibitions.
Her earliest solo show was at the age of six, an exhibition of 300 clay sculptures. And even at that age, she revealed a playful and uninhibited approach to forms, something which she has refined into figurative and abstract paintings, mixed media installations, and terracotta sculptures.
Aba’s use of paint and color reveals an emotional creative force that grapples with real life issues. What at first glance could be seen as simply frenetic celebrations of color in themes of hope, love, and transcendence, give clues to a deeper struggle. As she puts it, “artmaking could be a good release for one’s brokenness and rage. It could also be a delicate and sincere expression, or a confession of love or madness, struggle and fears.” As such, many of her current paintings have a political and spiritual message.
Among her recent projects was a creative involvement with the children of displaced Lumads or indigenous Filipino communities. This included workshops and exhibitions to raise awareness of the plight of Lumad people and their unjust killing by the military. Meanwhile, her recent paintings have been spiritual meditations on pain and creativity - “pain because of country; spiritual crises; love; sickness and death; financial crisis; labor and toil and currently about the coronavirus world pandemic.”
Aba Dalena’s solo exhibition called Sensucht can be found only on Vintana. It consists of abstract expressionist paintings that are swells on feelings, personal relationships, and biblical truths. Visit it here.
