Background

Manuel Ocampo was born on February 20, 1965 in Quezon City, Philippines.

Education

Manuel Ocampo studied fine arts at the University of the Philippines in Quezon City in 1984, then moved to Los Angeles, California in 1985, where he briefly studied at the California State University, Bakersfield while working at McDonald’s.

Career

Manuel Ocampo’s first solo exhibition, which took place in Los Angeles in 1988, set the stage for a rapid rise to international prominence. By the early 1990s, his reputation was firmly established, with inclusion in Documenta IX (1992), the Venice Biennale (1993) and the seminal exhibition Helter Skelter: L.A. Art in the 1990s at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1992). During the 1990s, Ocampo was noted for his bold use of a highly charged iconography that combines Catholic imagery with motifs associated with racial and political oppression, creating works that make powerful, often conflicted, statements about the vicissitudes of personal and group identities. His works illustrate, often quite graphically, the psychic wounds that cut deep into the body of contemporary society. They translate the visceral force of Spanish Catholic art, with its bleeding Christs and tortured saints, into our postmodern, more secular era of doubt, uncertainty, and instability.

Besides, one of his pieces featuring several swastikas was censored at the Dokumenta art show in Kassel, Germany. Manuel Ocampo has exhibited extensively throughout the 1990s, with solo exhibitions at galleries and institutions through Europe, Asia, and the Americas.

In 2005, his work was the subject of a large-scale survey at Casa Asia in Barcelona, and Lieu d’Art Contemporain, Sigean, France. Ocampo's work has been included in a number of international surveys, including the 2004 Seville Biennale, 2001 Venice Biennale, the 2001 Berlin Biennale, the 2000 Biennale d’art Contemporain de Lyon, and the 1997 Kwangju Biennial.

In 2003, Ocampo moved back to the Philippines and co-founded the Department of Avant-Garde Clichés Gallery in Manila.

In recent years, Ocampo’s works have featured more mysterious yet emotionally charged motifs that evoke an inner world of haunting visions and nightmares. He often makes use of an eclectic array of quasi-religious, highly idiosyncratic icons featuring teeth, fetuses, sausages, and body parts alongside more traditional Christian motifs. The process of artistic creation is often a central concern, with many works making ironic commentaries on notions of artistic inspiration, originality, and the anxiety of influence.

He frequently includes sly references to the works of other artists, just as in the past he often referred to the work of provincial painters of Catholic altars. For The Corrections, his 2015 solo exhibition at Tyler Rollins Fine Art, Ocampo made silkscreens based on photographs of his older paintings, mainly well-known works from the ‘90s, altering the images to resemble darkened and distorted photographic negatives. New interventions were then hand painted on top of these images, creating rich, multi-layered compositions that capture a sense of the passing of time, the evolution of consciousness, and the ongoing structuring of personal and group identities.

In addition, Ocampo was recently featured in the Philippine Pavilion for the 2017 Venice Biennale, with a selection of paintings from the 1990s in dialogue with his recent work.

Now based in Manila, the Philippines, he had an extended residency in California in the late 1980s and early 1990s and continues to spend significant time working in both the United States and Europe.

Achievements

• Manuel Ocampo is known for his bold, controversial references to politics, religion and race, as he utilises a wide range of popular iconography like the swastikas, crucifixes, teeth, feces, flowers, and emoticons.
  
  Moreover, Ocampo is the recipient of a number of prestigious grants and awards, including the National Endowment for the Arts in 1996, the Rome Prize in Visual Arts in 1995-1996, and The Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant in 1995, and the Lila Wallace Reader’s Digest Artists at Giverny Program in 1998.
  
  In addition, Ocampo’s works are held in the collections of the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum in Japan, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid, among others.
  
  Besides, Ocampo's 1992 painting "Why I Hate Europeans" was used as the cover art to the music album "Mythmaker" by Skinny Puppy.
  
  Phillip Rodriguez directed a one-hour documentary of Ocampo's life and art career "Manuel Ocampo, God Is My Copilot".

Works

More photos

• painting

  • R

    1985

  • SANS TITRE

    2004

  • Comprehensible Only To A Few Initiates

    2015

  • Guided by Sausage

    2007

  • Untitled

    2017

  • Murio la Verdad

    1990

  • Ospital San Lukas

    1990

  • Noli Me Tangere

    1991

  • La Ripaille - The Priest

    1991

  • 1971

    1989

  • 666 Beast Dollar

    1989

  • Flowers with Eyes

    2013

  • A Theatrical Transference Of Gothic

    2006

  • Iystasion VIII

    1994

  • Untitled

    2004

  • Francis Kittenburg 1965

    2012

  • Ohne Titel

    2011

  • Yo soy la Virgen de Calidad

    1994

  • Injection (Pilipinas)

    1989

  • Sin título

    1994

  • Clown Torture

    2000

  • Senza titolo

    1991

  • River

    2005

  • Peu de chiens - Few dogs

    1991

  • Tratado de enfermeria

    1990

  • Karl Marx ejaculating

    1996

  • A responsability in the name of ideas

    2000

  • Incel Patrol

    2018

  • Intersectional Altarpiece

    2018

  • Minima Moralia

    2015

  • Monument to the aesthetizisation of desublimated fantasies rendered impotent by unredeemable gestures

    2008

  • Saturado

    1995

  • Zygotic Emancipator #1

    2017

  • La Liberté

    2014

  • Utopian Cargo

    2017

  • HAHAHA UTOPIA

    2018

  • Crème de la Crème

    1995

  • The Legacy of Relativism

    2018

  • On a Witch Hunt

    2018

  • One Annihilates While Thinking

    2018

Views

Quotations: "There are a lot of ghosts in paintings. Paintings are not spectacular, they are not experience driven, they require a slow read."

Connections

Ocampo has a wife and four children, Juliao Ocampo, Yulla Ocampo, Xabine Ocampo, and Xantiago Ocampo.

Son:

Juliao Ocampo

Daughter:

Yulla Ocampo

Daughter:

Xabine Ocampo

Son:

Xantiago Ocampo

References

• Manuel Ocampo: Fear of a Kitsch Existence Menene Gras Balaguer's book on Manuel Ocampo deals with more than three decades of the artist’s career, from the late 80s to the present. "Fear of a Kitsch Existence" refers to how Ocampo believe his artwork should be considered, although he leaves it open to interpretation.
  2017
• Manuel Ocampo
  2013
• Manuel Ocampo: Heridas De LA Lengua, Selected Works
  1997