Pioneering Filipino artist, best known for his kinetic works, and founder of galleries and biennials
Born in Manila, David Medalla got off to a precocious start, having been admitted as a special student at Colombia University, on the recommendation of the poet Mark Van Doren, at the age of fourteen. By the 1960s (following a brief return to his homeland) he was in Europe, first in Paris, where the artist and his work were introduced to the likes of Marcel Duchamp, Louis Aragon and Gaston Bachelard, and then in London, where he cofounded the shortlived but now cultishly influential Signals gallery (1964–7) and, later, the open-submission London Biennale (1998). From 1974 to 1977 he was chairman of Artists for Democracy, which was dedicated to giving ‘material and cultural support to liberation movements worldwide’.
Medalla is best known for his ‘Cloud Canyons’ sculptures – plastic tubes that emit looping, snakelike columns of soap bubbles – which were among the experiments in kinetic art (which the artist termed ‘auto-creative art’, in response to his friend Gustav Metzger’s ‘auto-destructive art’) the artist embarked on at the outset of the 1960s. While these works look like they were inspired by playgrounds, nightclubs and the artist’s experience of air travel, the works were in part inspired, according to Medalla, by a childhood experience of witnessing a Japanese soldier kill a guerrilla fighter and the subsequent bubbling up of blood from the latter’s throat. It was, in part, Medalla’s ability to mix lightness and seriousness in works of art that were, by the late 1960s, becoming more participatory in nature that led to their inclusion in a number of biennials and other largescale international art shows from the 1970s onwards.
Medalla died in Manila this past Monday.
