Arvin Flores

In Filipino contemporary artist Arvin Flores' paintings you will find the explosive interaction of abstraction and figuration created by gestural mark making and composition. Describing his process, Flores often starts his paintings with spontaneous doodles that turn into complex cascades of anthropomorphic shapes and patterns.

Words and other recognizable forms pop-up, coalesce, merge, or disappear into the hard-edged and sinuous painterly structures that dominate his canvases. Expect to see humorous or philosophical texts, street-style writing or graffiti, rock music icons, abstract expressionism, comic books, philosophy, astronauts...nothing seems to be off-limits. They reveal a mind preoccupied with the culture of art, history, metaphysics, politics, technology, and the everyday.

In Arvin’s own words, he paints the way he does “to reveal the plastic character of painting. In other words, painting’s “concreteness or materiality, spatial construction on a flat format, particular marking system, and complex color modulation.”

Arvin Flores is a Philippine-born painter with an MFA graduate degree from The School of the Arts, Columbia University, New York NY, and a BFA from the College of Creative Studies, University of California at Santa Barbara. He has shown at The University of Massachusetts Amherst's Hampden Gallery, Columbia University's LeRoy Neiman and Wallach Art Galleries, Aljira Contemporary Art Center NJ, Southern Exposure Gallery SF. In Manila, he has had solo exhibitions at Mag:net Gallery, Finale Art File Gallery, and West Gallery. He is also a co-owner and a curator at Artery Art Space, an independent artist-run space in the Philippines.