Art Stroll Sunday Feature – “Genesis: Leggenda Filippina” (1963)

Posted on: February 12, 2023 | National Museum of the Philippines

For this week’s #ArtStrollSunday, we feature Cenon Rivera’s artistic excellence or “galing” in time for National Arts Month this February with the theme “Ani ng Sining, Bunga ng Galing,” through his painting entitled “Genesis: Leggenda Filippina.”

Rivera (1922-1998) was an art teacher, painter, writer, printmaker, stained glass artist, and sculptor. In 1957, he started a painting style characterized by horizontal and vertical grids as seen in this oil on canvas work which was created in 1963 in Rome, Italy. It is currently exhibited at the National Museum of Fine Arts, Third Floor Southwest Wing Hallway Gallery, along with other abstract works by Filipino modernist painters. Four of his paintings, including this masterpiece, are part of the National Fine Arts Collection.

Rivera was born on April 16, 1922, in Hagonoy, Bulacan. He began his artistic career in 1952 by pioneering in graphic art. In 1956, he experimented with monoprint, woodcut, linocut, lawanicut, and serigraph. Also, in that year, he started teaching at his alma mater, the University of Santo Tomas, and published “Pintig ng Buhay at iba pang Katha”, a limited edition bilingual collection of his short stories, poems, essays, and other writings from 1938 to 1956. Rivera received a study grant in Rome, Italy and took painting courses at the Academia di Belle Arti, and learned stained glass making at Vertrate d’Arte Giuliani as an apprentice. One of his designs is a three-panel stained glass “The Call to Arms”, The Supreme Sacrifice” and “Peace” located at the Mt. Samat National Shrine in Bataan. Cenon Rivera’s contribution to Philippine art is not only evidenced by his body of works as an artist, but also by his passion as an art educator and his contributions to his hometown, Hagonoy, and Pasig. He passed away on November 25, 1998.

Celebrate National Arts Month with us! For visitor guidelines, please visit bit.ly/3Hz3IwK. You may also view the 360 degrees virtual tour of selected NMFA galleries on the link https://www.nationalmuseum.gov.ph/nmfa360/HTML5/NMFA360.html. See you at your National Museum!

#CenonRivera #ArtStrollSunday #NAM2023

Text by NMP-FAD

Photo by Bengy Toda