David Medalla: Parables of Friendship

Bonner Kunstverein and Museion Bolzano present the first in-depth European survey of the late-Filipino artist David Medalla’s work.

This large-scale, two-part presentation foregrounds Medalla’s vital avant-garde legacy, reflecting on the spirit, ethos, energy and radicality of his practice. Planned during Medalla’s lifetime, the exhibition has been realised in close collaboration with the David Medalla Archive in Berlin, following the artist’s untimely passing in December 2020.

Spanning his seven-decade-long career, Parables of Friendship presents a body of work that encompasses drawing, painting, collage, sculpture, neon, kinetic art, performance and participatory art. Works from Medalla’s vast archive appear alongside loaned pieces and new commissions, with many fragile and previously unseen works that have been specially restored and will be publicly presented for the first time. Building on the contemporary relevance and urgency of Medalla’s practice, Parables of Friendship makes connections between the historical strands and legacies of his approach.

Heavily influenced by European art and literature of the 19th and 20th centuries, Medalla travelled to Europe from the Philippines as a young man, arriving in Marseille in 1960, where he began to establish his peripatetic practice. As an active figure in 1960s London, Medalla was instrumental in the short-lived but pioneering and influential Signals Gallery (1962–64), the experimental performance collective The Exploding Galaxy (1967–68) and the politically engaged Artists for Democracy, of which he was chairman (1974–77). In later years, Medalla founded The Mondrian Fan Club, in collaboration with artist Adam Nankervis (1994), and the London Biennale (2000), where processes of collaboration and exchange continued to assert their relevance to his practice.

These moments of intense dialogue were catalysts to his interconnected vision. His work is characterised by openness and freedom of expression, and his approach and ethos—both artistically and politically—are founded on the possibility of a form of exchange that invites engagement and fosters an active exploration of the intersection between art and life. In his art-making, writing and activist work, Medalla maintained an ongoing dialogue with questions of ecology, cultural identity, sexuality and an ethics of practice, with little concern for compartmentalization or static meaning.

Medalla lived in many places, including London, Paris, Venice, Berlin, New York and Manila, and the experiences of travel, place, transition and flux run throughout his work. It was often ephemeral or perishable, produced using materials that resulted from a particular circumstance or place in which he found himself—a canvas, a napkin, an envelope, a notebook—with his chosen medium frequently reflecting the sincerely free nature of his practice. His instantaneous “impromptu” performances were similarly transitory, occurring in the moment and simply recorded through writing and photographs. His performative presence—an embodied materiality—was symbolic of self-reliance and the possibility of creating art with little means.

Medalla’s work exists in multiple realities, some of them fictional and located beyond a dominant paradigm of the real—a movement between the material and the spiritual. For Medalla, the “desire and pursuit of the whole” necessitated an exploration of difference. His work contains reflections on the paradoxes, both liberating and painful, that reside within cultural identity. Identity in Medalla’s work is a multitemporal and multidirectional process—a profoundly experiential and experimental relation to being. The ways in which multiplicity was explored within his practice—with curiosity, criticality and humour—are themselves a part of the spirit and approach that this exhibition seeks to channel and honour. 

David Medalla: Parables of Friendship is curated by Fatima Hellberg and Steven Cairns with exhibition design by Michael Kleine.

Special thanks to Adam Nankervis and the Archive of David Medalla/another vacant space, and Bart van der Heide, Director, Museion Bolzano.