Roberto Chabet
Encyclopedia
Career
Chabet studied architecture at the University of Santo TomasUniversity of Santo Tomas
The Pontifical and Royal University of Santo Tomas, The Catholic University of the Philippines , is a private Roman Catholic university run by the Order of Preachers in Manila. Founded on April 28, 1611 by archbishop of Manila Miguel de Benavides, it has the oldest extant university charter in the...
where he graduated in 1961. He had his first solo exhibition at the Luz Gallery in the same year. He was the founding museum director of the Cultural Center of the Philippines and served there as curator from 1967–1970. He initiated the first 13 Artists Awards, giving recognition to young artists whose works 'show a recentness, a turning away from the past and familiar modes of art-making'.
He led the 1970s conceptual art group called Shop 6 and taught for over 30 years at the UP College of Fine Arts, where he espoused an art practice that gave precedence to idea over form. Since the 1970s, he has been organizing landmark exhibitions featuring works by young artists.
Chabet described his pieces as "creatures of memory" and himself as their "custodian." His works are the result of a process of unraveling of fixed notions about art and meaning. Highly allegorical, his drawings, collages, sculptures and installations question modernity. His works are meditations on space, the transitory nature of commonplace objects and the collisions that occur with their displacement.
Prolific and multifaceted, Chabet has ventured into architecture, painting, printmaking, sculpture, stage designing, teaching and writing.
Shows
Chabet has had six individual exhibitions at The Luz Gallery since 1961 and has been an active participant in local group shows. Represented in the collections of the National Museum, Ateneo Art Gallery, Cultural Center, and several private collections.Galleria Duemila showed drawings from Chabet's early period in an exhibition entitled "Selected Chabet Drawings 60s-70s" at its gallery in May 2004.