November for the art-minded
The second-to-last month of the year has plenty to explore for the artfully inclined. While you’re out and about, catch these exhibitions in galleries across the city.
“Modern Fairytale” by Ian Anderson at Manila House
Nov. 1 to Jan. 31, 2027
After nearly two decades of working through meticulous micro art, Anderson has decided to expand his practice to the macro. “I loved fairy tales as a kid,” Anderson shares, although, “they scared the shit out of me… Aside from the vibrant, almost Crayola-box color palette I’ve used, there’s a sinister quality to the work.” This shows in his new series, from a riotous gathering of peculiar patrons inside a bar to whimsical, witch-like birds taking flight against an electric blue sky and pale pink moon.
“Rooms Within Me” by Gracinha “Inha” Arceo-Yu at Altro Mondo Creative Space
Oct. 24 to Nov. 21
Arceo-Yu considers the home as a metaphor for the self, portrayed poignantly through familiar Filipino interiors, painted in recognizable, emotional scenes of shared meals, dotted with tropical plants. As she writes in the exhibition notes, “Perhaps healing is not about finding a way out, but learning to feel at home within ourselves.”
“Kung Saan Dumadapo ang Alikabok” curated by Lanzvoltaire Balagtas at Altro Mondo Creative Space
Oct. 24 to Nov. 21
Is dust just dirt? This exhibition treats the smallest, often unnoticed marks as a trace of presence, in a group show with multiple artists who move through forms and textures, such as Carla Gamalinda, Honey Maglalang, Steven Natal, and many more emerging artists.
“Terrains of Instability” by Ben Brix, Karina Broce-Gonzaga, Kiri Dalena, and Frelan Gonzaga at Mo_Space
Oct. 24 to Nov. 22
Builds on Dalena’s ongoing collaboration with Brix, while deepening dialogue with Negros-based artists Broce-Gonzaga and Gonzaga, the exhibition references Mount Kanlaon in Negros which CMN describes in the exhibition notes as land “permanently marked by feudalism, labor exploitation, and historical unrest.” The artists work with raw earth, sugar, dried bagasse, embroidery, and wood salvaged from a burned ancestral home, translating experiences of displacement into a “living landscape of resistance… showing that even when foundations burn and fields are exploited, making art becomes an undeniable proof of survival” (CMN).
“Object Image Memory Devoid” by Beejay Esber at Brixton Art Space
Nov. 7 to Dec. 2026
“As technology transforms our vision, the line between reality and its constructed image disappears,” Esber writes. “Nostalgia is packaged, priced, and sold back to us as escape… Every vision of paradise has a polished surface.” Technology has altered our perception of real life. But through his distinct phantasmagoric abstractions, Esber creates in a manner that makes one reflect on how, “beneath every image, object, and memory is a human choice about what to keep.”
“Sa Ibang Dako (Elsewhere)” by Auggie Fontanilla at Blanc Gallery
Nov. 7 to 28
A map pinpoints where something is, but Fontanilla looks to the layers that make a place. Through fragments of Filipino pop culture, street typography, folklore, religious symbols, jailhouse tattoos, and other visual references, he reworks cartographic imagery to create a portrait of the people who inhabit a place.
“Luntiang Ulap” by Ryan Jara at Finale Art File
Nov. 7 to 30
We may know Jara for his darker work, but now the artist takes a turn, imagining a slower existence away from the noise of the city, grounded in the province. His distinctively spliced figures depict himself and his family, balancing both work and leisure through bucolic landscapes under trees, waterfalls, and blue skies.
“Strange Palace” by Tiffany Lafuente at Finale Art File
Nov. 7 to 30
Lafuente continues her experimentations with the uncanny, now in settings that are both luxurious and exquisite. Enigmatic as always, furniture comes to life, influenced by the mood of the painting’s moment, creating narratives that push viewers to ponder its “peculiar logic, characters, and tensions,” as Carlomar Arcangel Daoana writes in the exhibition notes.
“In My End Is My Beginning” by Alfonso Ossorio at the Metropolitan Museum of Manila
Nov. 8 to May 30, 2027
Moving in the orbit of New York’s Abstract Expressionists, including Jackson Pollock, Philippine-born Ossorio nevertheless forged a visual language of his own. This exhibition, drawn from the Lito and Kim Camacho Collection, traces six decades of his practice, from early drawings to the visceral assemblages of his “Congregation” series.
“Miniaturismo to Modernism: Philippine Art from the 19th Century to the Sixties” at the Metropolitan Museum of Manila
Nov. 8 to May 30, 2027
Curated by Patrick Flores, this broad survey charts the changing contours of Philippine art from the 19th century to the 1960s. Bringing together works by Damian Domingo, Juan Luna, David Medalla, and many others, it follows the Philippines’ general progression in art from its colonial past to the break with tradition that ushered in a distinctly Filipino language in dialogue with the global world.
“Nakaraan” by Neil Pasilan at Finale Art File
Nov. 7 to 30
Pasilan continues to paint with that phantasmal aura, now depicting the past in fragments, incorporating collages with magazine pages, portraits of childhood friends from Bacolod, layered over imagery like cane fields, church silhouettes, and the bones of old houses, all in his distinctly naïve style that’s so easy to be moved by.
“Under World” by Andie Remulla at Pictures in the Living Room
Opened Nov. 11
Underwater photographer, lens-based artist, and RED cover star Remulla stitches images of minuscule marine life into narratives that always call viewers back to care for our blue planet. This series of work dives deeper into her process of blackwater photography, highlighting what’s often overlooked through an otherworldly lens.
“Dingsalan ne Domaget” at NCCA Gallery
Nov. 9 to 30
“Ang pakikibaka para sa lupa ay pakikibaka para sa buhay at kultura,” writes Aurora Artist Residency Program and Space (AARPS). The exhibition works with the Domaget-Bulos community of Sitio Singawan, Dingalan, Aurora as co-designers and co-researchers who face land tenure crises because of development aggression. Through intensive fieldwork, cultural mapping, and collective design workshops with descendants of these nomadic peoples who are deeply rooted in the land, the project looks at how spatial design can help a community preserve its heritage, claim its rights, and imagine its future, asserting that the people who know a place best should have a say in shaping what becomes of it.
“Uncommonwealth” by Nice Buenaventura at Artinformal
Nov. 26 to Jan. 8, 2027
Buenaventura creates strikingly precise and complex works that often depict misprints and other analog communications to interrogate value systems. She writes, “‘Uncommonwealth’ asks what begins to count as wealth when wealth has become anything but common.” She prompts reconsideration of how value is measured, writing, “I consider time, attention, play, rest, knowledge without obvious utility, things we keep just because, and things we keep spending resources on even when there are no returns to speak of… Not every unquantifiable return, it turns out, is a bad investment.”
A turning point for the Philippines