From classical to modern: masterpieces by Juan Luna, H.R. Ocampo, and Zobel at León Gallery auction

H.R. Ocampo, Juan Luna, Juvenal Sansó, and Zobel Masterworks from Across the Ages Go Under the Hammer

While León Gallery’s 2025 Kingly Treasures Auction is sending historical artifacts under the hammer, it also showcases an unparalleled selection of art from modern and classical masters, representing the depth of Philippine art history.

Modernist Masterworks: The Nikki Coseteng Collection

From the treasure trove of art enthusiast and collector Anna Dominique Marquez-Lim Coseteng—popularly known as “Nikki” in both the political and art spheres—come important works of H.R. Ocampo and Ang Kiukok.

Coseteng, an esteemed collector, was close to these Filipino modernists. She grew up during modernism’s heyday in the country; canvases were filled with bursts of color, and geometric forms and fractured planes punctuated the Philippine art scene. Her inclination to modernist-style works developed here, and despite her travels, she was drawn to Ocampo’s and Kiukok’s pieces, finding the former’s work to be more soothing and less jarring and confrontational.

One of the highlights of this collection is H.R. Ocampo’s Kalaanan. Painted in 1968, this piece was a pivotal moment in H.R.’s professional career, marking his retirement from years of advertising work to dedicate his life to full-time painting. Towards the end of the 1960s, he developed into the visual melody period, in which he brought tonalities into his abstract designs of organic shapes, creating a richer form of abstraction. This work, with its vibrant colors and dynamic composition, also pays homage to his hometown of Caloocan. Ocampo was one of the leading Filipino modernists of his time, known for his unique canvases offering a harmonious blend of form and color.

The Coveted Serie Negra by Fernando Zobel

León’s 2025 Kingly Treasures Auction also features a pivotal masterpiece from Fernando Zobel’s final exhibition in the Philippines—a coveted work from his Serie Negra or Black Series. In 1960, Zobel started to develop the style for which he is now widely known: a spare black and white abstraction in which lines are laid on by means of a hypodermic syringe and tones are created by flicking a dry brush over wet paint, with areas of empty space.

Classical Masters and Poetic Surrealism

From the storied collection of Ambassador Pedro Conlu Hernaez, Juan Luna’s darkly enigmatic and mythological La Infancia de la Naturaleza (The Childhood of Nature) will also be up for bids.

“La Infancia is of a far darker beauty as of [Juan Luna’s other] works and cleaves closer to the raw emotion of the Spoliarium,” says historian Lisa Guerrero Nakpil.

The auction also presents Juvenal Sansó’s Flourish of Spring. Through the years, Sansó developed a unique style often labelled “poetic surrealism.” Critic Rod Paras Perez describes Sansó’s art as having a “palette that is as austere as it is rich in its modulation: the key color, either blue or orange.” In Flourish of Spring, Sansó creates an otherworldly realm, utilizing a dry-on-dry technique that imparts his plants texture and a sense of motion.

Also on offer is a painting on mother-of-pearl by Felix Martinez, depicting an idyllic, 19th-century countryside. The painting shows Martinez to be a costumbrista—an artist who explores the nuances of the everyday—whose treatment of themes is imbued with incisive realism.

Leading Contemporary Stars

Leading contemporary stars also take the spotlight at the auction. Representatives of their cutting-edge, contemporary generation, artists Leo Valledor, Manuel Ocampo, and Jigger Cruz display the best this country has to offer in recent years.

• • Leo Valledor
    
    • • This abstract painter merges sharp-edged geometry with selective use of colors. His piece, Alone Together, an acrylic-on-canvas work, is a visual exploration of profound solitude despite its relatively sparse use of space. His style aligns with the hard-edge painting he championed during his stint at the Park Place Gallery in SoHo, New York City.

• • Jigger Cruz
    
    • • Cruz relies on chance and an innate sense of color to conjure his off-kilter canvases. His piece, Disjointed (Diptych), made with oil and spray paint on canvas and wood, displays his signature practice of layering, burning, cutting, and desecrating. This reflects both the artist’s rebellion and renewal, transforming his works into a battlefield between abstraction and figuration.

• • Manuel Ocampo
    
    • • Ocampo expresses a childlike exuberance and a love for depicting the chaos of society. As shown in Petrope (oil and collage on wood), Ocampo’s tongue-in-cheek approach to society’s horrors lends an almost cartoonish quality to his works. Known for his deliberately unsettling paintings, his pieces serve as a commentary on culture, identity, religion, and history, provoking Filipino society.

Collecting distinctive works of art from different eras of Philippine history, León Gallery’s The Kingly Treasures Auction 2025 is set to take place on December 6.

 

 

León Gallery’s Kingly Treasures Auction showcases a stunning range of Filipino masters, from Juan Luna’s classical mythology to H.R. Ocampo’s vibrant modern abstraction and Fernando Zobel’s coveted Serie Negra.

 

 

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